Preamble

The House met at half-past Two o'clock

PRAYERS

[Mr. SPEAKER in the Chair]

PETITIONS

Jersey

Mr. Alfred Morris: With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I beg leave to present two Petitions. The first bears the signatures of people from every walk of life in the island of Jersey, from manual workers to company directors and from housewives to horticulturists. The second Petition is from Jersey fishermen. Each of the Petitions speaks of the serious effects for the islanders of Jersey if the United Kingdom enters the EEC on the terms negotiated. The two Petitions have widespread support from Jersey.
I am informed that the House has not received a Petition from the Channel Islands for more than a century. The Petitions are therefore of historic importance.
The first Petition
Showeth that serious difficulties are likely to be encountered by the people of Jersey, arising out of the United Kingdom's proposed entry into the EEC…and that whereas the Island Government, by majority vote, did
In December, 1971,
approve of the special terms and arrangements…for the Channel Islands, such decision was taken without the Island being given a fair opportunity of considering the full implications of the said terms.
The fear is expressed
that Jersey's economic and social position would be endangered as a result of the United Kingdom's inability to recognise fully Jersey's ancient constitutional rights, arising from its most ancient bonds with the Sovereign.…The Islanders are extremely fearful that the terms …would be repugnant to Jersey's constitutional practice. …

Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House will urge Her Majesty's Government to seriously reconsider the advisability of taking the final step into the EEC. Jersey is mindful of the serious effect that such a decision is bound to have on the constitutional bonds which have existed from time immemorial with Jersey and the other Channel Islands, as also with member States of the Commonwealth.
The second Petition
Sheweth that after 1st January, 1973, there will be no protected fishing limits at all for the Island due to the fact that whilst some provisions were negotiated…for the fishermen of the United Kingdom at Brussels, no provisions were made or negotiated for the fishermen of the Channel Islands at all, due to an oversight of the negotiators at the time, and that whilst at present the Island has a very unsatisfactory limit of protection of three miles only around the shores of the mainland of Jersey and only 150 yards on its outer reefs and islets, after the United Kingdom's proposed entry to the EEC Jersey…will have no provision in those terms for its fishing industry or its fishermen's future livelihoods.
It is therefore essential that some form of protected limits be established for the Island of Jersey which will exclude the EEC fishermen from these proposed established area protected limits. The fishermen therefore suggest that an all-round limit or protected area of a minimum of six miles from low water be laid down and be negotiated for with the EEC.
Wherefore your petitioners pray that immediate steps to protect the Channel Island's fishing rights be established by your Honourable House forthwith.
To lie upon the Table.

Oral Answers to Questions — TRADE AND INDUSTRY

Ship Repairing Industry

Mr. Tilney: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what aid he is at present giving to the ship repairing industry in Great Britain.

The Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mr. Anthony Grant): The ship repair industry, in common with other industries, receives taxation allowances on capital expenditure and regional employment premium. It shares with the shipbuilding industry Customs concessions on imported materials. Under the Industry Bill it will be eligible for regional development grant and selective assistance.

Mr. Tilney: Is my hon. Friend aware that the shipbuilding and ship repairing industries are quite different, that both are strategically important to this country and that because of the standby the ship repairing industry is bleeding to death?

Mr. Grant: I realise that the industries are different and I understand the difficulties of the ship repairing industry. However, what they have in common is that they will both benefit from the Industry Bill which is now before the House.

Mr. R. C. Mitchell: Will the hon. Gentleman take special note of the ship repairing industries in areas outside development areas, like Southampton, which are experiencing considerable difficulty in making themselves go?

Mr. Grant: I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says. But the greater difficulties are in the assisted areas where there is a high degree of unemployment and not as great a diversity of industry as there is in the non-assisted areas.

Stansted Airport

Mr. David Steel: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement on the long-term future of Stansted Airport.

The Under-Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (Mr. Cranley Onslow): When Maplin becomes operational we see the possibility of closing Stansted as a public transport airport and perhaps of dispensing with it altogether. We are in close touch with the BAA and the CAA about employment there in the interim.

Mr. Steel: Can the hon. Gentleman give any indication of how long it will be before a definite decision is taken on the future of Stansted?

Mr. Onslow: I cannot give a definite forecast but we expect Maplin to become operational in 1980, which fits the time scale. In the interim we are asking the British Airports Authority and the Civil Aviation Authority to see what possibilities there are of encouraging the deployment of traffic to Stansted with a view to its ultimate transfer to Maplin.

Mr. Tebbit: Is my hon. Friend aware that what he says will cause a consider

able amount of gloom among many people in and around my constituency? Certainly they will all welcome the quietness of less flying, but already there is a substantial number of men unemployed who worked at the airport and who want to go on working there. Will my hon. Friend see to it that jobs are retained in the aviation industry for those working there?

Mr. Onslow: I hope it will not cause gloom in my hon. Friend's constituency to know that we want to keep jobs going at Stansted against the time when men will be needed at Maplin.

Mr. Mason: Perhaps the hon. Gentleman may indicate, therefore, what future there is at Stansted and what developments will take place when it is closed down. Secondly, what will be the future of the Civil Aviation Flying Unit which, I understand, operates from there?

Mr. Onslow: The right hon. Gentleman is right: the CAFU is based at Stansted and could continue to be based there, even if the airport is not used as a public transport airport. Another possibility will be its increased use as a general aviation field which improved road communications might make attractive.

North Sea Oil and Gas (Scottish Participation)

Mr. William Hamilton: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he is satisfied that the Scottish economy and Scottish companies are sharing as fully as possible in the benefits accruing from the development of North Sea oil and gas; and what new plans he has to increase Scottish participation.

The Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade (Mr. John Davies): The Government are taking all possible steps to draw the opportunities to the attention of industry. It is for industry to grasp these opportunities and a number of Scottish firms have already won orders for equipment. The report I have commissioned from consultants, which I expect to receive in the autumn, will assist me in identifying in what further ways the benefits to industry and the economy may be promoted.

Mr. Hamilton: Will the right hon. Gentlemen undertake to make that report available to the House? Does he recognise, in view of the statement today that Royal Dutch Shell has made a very major discovery of, I think it is, 1,000 million barrels of recoverable oil, which represents about 15 per cent. of our current needs, that this is an extremely important development which underlines the need for revising the legislation on the granting of licences? Can he say what Royal Dutch Shell paid for this particular licence? Will he take steps to make sure that the infrastructure is provided in large measure by the Scottish Department and that it will insist that the oil companies use more indigenous industrial products for their oil requirements?

Mr. Davies: If, as I sincerely hope, and I am sure the whole House does, the oil find to which the hon. Member has referred is of the dimensions he has mentioned, then indeed this is a vindication of the principle which both Governments have followed of trying to ensure that the maximum prospection of the North Sea area was undertaken. At the same time I can assure the hon. Member that the Government have made it plain, and I do so again now, that the treatment by licensees of the British supplying industry will certainly be a consideration in the award of future licences.

Mr. Sproat: Will my right hon. Friend seriously consider the possibility of transferring to Aberdeen the approximately 90 members of the petroleum division of his Department so that they can be on the spot at the earliest moment to identify the problems and opportunities met for Scottish and British industry?

Mr. Davies: I have a feeling that the real demand for work requires them to be located more here than there, but it will be necessary—and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland recognises this also—to maintain close relations with the developing interests in these fields.

Mr. Benn: While I welcome what the right hon. Gentleman has said, may I ask him whether the Government will now make a conscious effort to develop support for these industries in Scotland so that they can meet the needs arising from

these new finds in the North Sea, rather than leave it simply to the application of the Industry Bill which, we hope, will shortly receive Royal Assent?

Mr. Davies: That is part of the purpose of my having commissioned the special consultancy report. The right hon. Gentleman should not lead the House to believe, however, that Scotland has lost a great deal of work in this field. Scotland is doing a great deal of work in the development of the oil finds in the North Sea. For instance, of the total number of mobile drilling platforms built for use in the North Sea no less than half, nine out of 18, were built in the United Kingdom, four of them in Scotland. So it would be wrong to form the impression that Scotland has literally made none of the supply.

Generalised Preferences Scheme

Mr. Sydney Chapman: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if it is the intention of Her Majesty's Government to agree to Israel, Rumania, Spain and Turkey being regarded as developing countries for the purpose of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development generalised preferences scheme.

The Minister for Trade (Mr. Michael Noble): We are not willing to extend the list of beneficiaries of our generalised preferences scheme unilaterally, but if these countries are accepted in the scheme of the European Economic Community we shall consider including them to the same extent as the Community does.

Mr. Chapman: While I am grateful for that reply may I ask my right hon. Friend whether he will, therefore, make the strongest representations that these four countries, which by any stretch of the imagination must be industrialised rather than developing countries, do not receive preferential treatment, so that those most in need will receive maximum help? Would my right hon. Friend agree that if the list is to be added to, it should not be before the closest re-examination of those manufactured goods and semi-manufactures which are to be allowed duty-free into this country?

Mr. Noble: Yes, I can assure my hon. friend on both those points.

Coal (Imports)

Mr. Edwin Wainwright: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he can now state when the existing arrangements for the importation of coal will be concluded.

Mr. Tom Boardman: Imports have fallen sharply in recent months but we are keeping a close watch on the position.

Mr. Wainwright: Does the Minister realise that there is a strong rumour running through the coal mining industry that there is a possibility of 50 pits being closed in the next two or three years even though there are coal reserves there? is he not aware that at the present time the Government are converting coal-fired power stations to oil and that there is a continuation and an increase of imported foreign oil and that the mining industry has to compete with North Sea gas and North Sea oil? Does he not therefore think it time that we had a national fuel policy on terms favourable to our home-produced indigenous fuels?

Mr. Boardman: I am sure the hon. Member would not expect me to comment on speculative reports which may be going around. On the question of imports, I am sure he will also agree that it is necessary to keep extra flexibility as an insurance by way of imports, and that he will recognise that some imports, for example of coking coal, will be needed to supplement United Kingdom supplies on quality grounds.

Mr. Normanton: Will my hon. Friend inform the House about the excellent opportunities which will be available to an efficient coal mining industry in Britain, and that those opportunities might well be at risk were protectionist policies to be promoted by the Government?

Mr. Boardman: Of course my hon. Friend is absolutely right. For example, in Europe alone imports are some 30 million tons per annum of which at the moment we supply only 2½ million tons. I hope that this is a market of which we can get a greater share.

Mr. Varley: While agreeing with a lot of what my hon. Friend the Member for Dearne Valley (Mr. Edwin Wainwright)

has said may I ask whether the Minister realises that there is a great deal of hostility in the mining industry to the import of coal? Can the Minister tell us what guidance he is offering to the Central Electricity Generating Board and the British Steel Corporation about their coal imports? Would it not be advisable if the Minister could talk not only to those two industries but to the National Coal Board to see how best an overall importing policy could be co-ordinated to safeguard the position of all three industries?

Mr. Boardman: I believe it is right to put the figures into perspective. While imports of coal last year were running at a high level following the immediate post-strike period, they have been falling rapidly and were only 500,000 tons in May and 400,000 tons in June. Arrangements between the National Coal Board, the CEGB and the BSC are for each of those industries to consider. They have been considering and discussing them, and I believe that there can be proper commercial arrangements in the interests of all three industries.

Concorde

Mr. Edelman: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what communications he has received from the French Minister of Transport in connection with the budget for Concorde's future development.

Mr. Onslow: None, Sir.

Mr. Edelman: Is there not undue secrecy in this matter? Is the hon. Gentleman aware of the anxieties of the aero-engine workers in my constituency that an arrangement has been made with the French Minister of Transport to reduce the production of Concorde in the future? Will he give an assurance that this is not so?

Mr. Onslow: I assure the hon. Gentleman that it is a question not of undue secrecy but of undue anxiety. I know of no such approach.

Mr. Hunt: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he is able to give an assurance that the Concorde simulator contract will be placed with a United Kingdom firm.

Mr. Onslow: All British manufacturers will be invited to tender and


although I cannot anticipate the outcome of the evaluation of submission, I know that our industry is very competitive in this field.

Mr. Hunt: Will my hon. Friend go a litle further and agree that there is every justification for a British firm being awarded this contract on the basis both of our expertise and our balance of payments?

Mr. Onslow: I assure my hon. Friend that I am very hopeful that a British firm will put in a successful tender for this project. We have asked BOAC, which will be placing tenders, to keep us closely informed of progress.

Mr. Millan: Is it not the present intention that there should be a simulator only in France, so that BOAC will have to go to France for simulator training? Why should we not have simulator facilities here?

Mr. Onslow: The hon. Gentleman is wrong. It has been decided that the simulator will be situated in this country.

Mr. Mason: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many Concorde aircraft will have to be sold to recover research and development costs based solely upon numbers sold and their present price.

Mr. Onslow: We have already made clear that there is no prospect of recovering all the research and development costs on this aircraft but we shall make every effort to recoup as much as possible of the country's investment.

Mr. Mason: That is not the answer to the Question. Now will the hon. Gentleman give the answer to the Question? How many will be sold to recover research and development costs based solely upon the numbers sold and their present price either of £13 million at 1971 prices or £21½ million at 1974 prices? What is the figure? Why cannot the House be informed?

Mr. Onslow: The right hon. Gentleman asks for details of a levy which I assure him it would not be in the interests of the project to make public. If he is saying that he doubts the sales prospects of this aircraft, he is not doing anything to help us to recoup the country's investment. If the right hon. Gentle-

man is saying that he would like more information on this subject, perhaps he would like to ask the House whether we can have a debate on the subject.

Mr. Mason: The hon. Gentleman knows full well that we on this side have questioned the Government vigorously over the last three months trying to extract information on the Concorde project, but we have failed so far. The Government are deliberately hiding facts and information regarding the Concorde project. We do not know the truth about the escalating costs of the project. The Select Committee on Expenditure chastised the Government and the Department on the subject. The hon. Gentleman and the Department are not kidding the airlines, because the airlines are doing their own arithmetic—

Mr. Speaker: Order. This is Question Time.

Mr. Mason: We have pressed for a debate, but will the hon. Gentleman now agree to publish a White Paper explaining the whole of the Concorde project—research and development costs, production costs and its likely sales?

Mr. Onslow: I have no knowledge that the right hon. Gentleman has pressed for a debate. He has been told that there will not be a White Paper. In answer to his question I must tell him again that it would not be in the interests of securing the best return on research and development to make public the rates of levy applied. I remind the right hon. Gentleman of the reply given by his right hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South-East (Mr. Benn) on 26th January, 1970, when he showed that he was aware of the extreme difficulty of presenting meaningful estimates of this kind.

Mr. Michael McNair-Wilson: Is my hon. Friend aware that we consider the remarks of the right hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason) purely mischievous? The right hon. Gentleman was a member of the previous Administration which must have known that research and development costs could not and would not be got back from sales of the aircraft. Will my hon. Friend take note of the fact that many people feel that questions of this sort are designed purely to hurt Concorde at the moment of sales?

Mr. Onslow: I am sure that most people in this country and in France will have drawn their own conclusions from the right hon. Gentleman's suggestions. I think that people everywhere would welcome some positive indication of support from the right hon. Gentleman for this project.

Mr. Joel Barnett: Would the hon. Gentleman agree that in his original answer he misled the House by distorting the facts? He said that all the research and development costs would not be recouped. Will he say whether any of the costs will be recouped? Is he, in what he has just said, saying that his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State disagrees with the all-party report of the Expenditure Committee?

Mr. Onslow: I think the hon. Gentleman will find that if there are to be comments on that Committee's report they will not be made by me in the first instance at Question Time in the House but in the form of departmental observations, and quite rightly so. If the hon. Gentleman is so interested in the matter, no doubt he will go on putting down Questions of his own.

Manchester

Mr. Kaufman: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many inquiries from industrialists with regard to the Manchester travel-to-work area have been received since the designation of the new North-Western intermediate area on 22nd March, 1972; and how many new jobs in total, and for men and women, respectively, are expected to result from these inquiries.

Mr. Anthony Grant: The number of inquiries about factories and about our new incentives have continued to increase since my right hon. Friend the Minister for Industrial Development answered the same Question on 17th July. I would hope that many of these inquiries will lead to benefit to Manchester.—[Vol. 841, c. 14–5.]

Mr. Kaufman: Is the Minister aware that that is a totally unsatisfactory answer? He has not told us of a single new job announcement, a single new inquiry or the granting of a single new IDC since the reply of the Minister for Industrial Development. Is he aware that

in Manchester redundancies are outnumbering new job creations by more than three to one, that thousands of redundancies are certain to come from closures at Irlam and Churchill's, apart from those already announced, that job creation is nowhere near keeping pace with redundancies and that, unless the Government do something, Manchester will be turned into a disaster area?

Mr. Grant: The hon. Gentleman has sung that song before, quite recently. I agree with the Chairman of the North-West Industrial Development Association who said in June that there were very encouraging signs that both consumers and producers were responding to the stimuli that the Government had provided, that business confidence was rising, that the number out of work was falling and that job vacancies were increasing. I believe that that more truly represents the position in Manchester than the gloomy prognostications of the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Arthur Davidson: Despite the lyricism of the Under-Secretary, will he cast his eyes up to North-East Lancashire, particularly to the serious position in my constituency of the 40 apprentices who have recently lost their jobs and are unable to find opportunities to finish their apprenticeships? Will he see whether there is a way by which these apprentices can be financed so that they do not have to go into dead-end jobs? While he is at it, will he also reconsider his earlier answer to me about not granting full development area status to North-East Lancashire?

Mr. Grant: I appreciate that North-East Lancashire has special problems in the context of the North-West as a whole, and we are keeping it carefully in mind. Nevertheless, North-East Lancashire, as well as other parts, will benefit from the policies we have announced in the Industry Bill.

Mr. Kaufman: In view of the unsatisfactory nature of that reply, I beg leave to give notice that I shall raise this matter on the Motion for the Summer Adjournment.

Slimming Aids (Advertisements)

Mr. Greville Janner: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry


whether he will now take steps to supress misleading advertisements for alleged slimming aids.

Mr. Noble: It is already an offence under the Trade Descriptions Act, 1968, to use a false or misleading trade description in advertisements for goods of this kind.

Mr. Janner: In those circumstances, and having regard to the clear evidence produced by the Consumers Association, may I ask how many prosecutions have been brought in respect of these advertisements?

Mr. Noble: As far as I know, none, but the local weights and measures authority is under a statutory duty to enforce the Act and has all the necessary powers of inquiry.

Mr. Edward Taylor: Does my right hon. Friend agree that even if there were prosecutions, individuals who pay cash for these so-called aids find great difficulty in getting redress for their grievances and have to go through the civil courts? Cannot a better way be found for people who are taken in by these misleading advertisements to get redress?

Mr. Noble: In many respects I agree with my hon. Friend, but the Advertising Standards Authority is well aware of this problem and is hoping shortly to be ready with a new publication about it. Slimming advertisements vary enormously, from taking exercise to eating less and every conceivable method in between. It would be a good thing to have a proper code of advertising practice and for the newspapers to accept it.

Ilkeston

Mr. Rost: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will pay an official visit to Ilkeston.

Mr. John Davies: I have at present no plans to visit Ilkeston.

Mr. Rost: I regret that my right hon. Friend has no immediate plans to visit the Stanton iron works in my constituency. Is he aware that the British Steel Corporation has so far not produced any substantial factual evidence to support the proposed closure of part of the works and its removal to Workington? Does he agree that the 1,500 workers

who are likely to be affected are entitled to have a detailed explanation of the economic position and that the British Steel Corporation has an obligation to make a commercially viable decision rather than the one it has made?

Mr. Davies: I am sure that the British Steel Corporation realises how necessary it is, in the course of the consultations which it has imposed upon itself by its own arrangement, to make abundantly clear the reasons for which it makes its decisions. The BSC has made it clear that the remaining activities at Stanton, which command a much bigger work force, are likely, on the contrary, to be pursued energetically.

Mr. Raymond Fletcher: I assure the right hon. Gentleman that when he does visit my constituency—and I sincerely hope he will—he will receive a much friendlier response than did the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South-East (Mr. Rost) who was literally hooted off the stage at a demonstration where he had no right to be. Will the Secretary of State refrain from paying an official visit to Ilkeston until such time as he has given a directive to the BSC to go for expansion, which will resolve the main problem arising in my constituency?

Mr. Davies: As the hon. Gentleman knows, it is my firm hope that the strategic plans of the BSC will be forthcoming shortly. I hope, therefore, that when Parliament reassembles after the summer break there will be an opportunity to talk with Parliament about the expansion plan and its importance for constituencies like that of the hon. Gentleman.

Footwear Production

Dr. Stuttaford: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what changes he expects in the level of boot and shoe production in the last two quarters of this year.

Mr. Anthony Grant: Forecasts of future production of boots and shoes are not available.

Dr. Stuttaford: Does my hon. Friend agree that any check in production such as might be occasioned by uncertainties over value added tax might be disastrous in an industry with such a finely balanced


economy? Will he therefore ask his right hon. and hon. Friends at the Treasury to expedite negotiations between the retailing and manufacturing sides of the industry?

Mr. Grant: My hon. Friend rightly defines questions relating to VAT as matters for my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I will certainly see that he takes notes of what my hon. Friend has said. The industry is in touch with Customs and Excise about its problems with VAT.

Mr. Heller: Will the hon. Gentleman inform the House what action the Government are taking to stop imports of footwear, particularly rubber footwear, from Hong Kong, Portugal and Korea? Footwear is coming into the country and being stamped by local manufacturers and sold as being of local manufacture. Is not this a disgrace, and is it not time that action was taken to protect the work force in the industry?

Mr. Grant: My immediate reaction is that if what the hon. Gentleman is saying is correct it sounds like an infringement of the trade description legislation, but I will certainly look into it. On the general question of imports, I have said that we will act quickly and flexibly to provide safeguards for the industry. We are in touch with the industry and are awaiting further information from it.

Cotton Yarn (Imports)

Mr. Frank Allaun: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what representations he has recently received regarding the Government proposal to remove the ceiling on cotton yarn imports on 1st January; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Noble: I explained the position in the reply I gave to the hon. Member for Oldham, East (Mr. James Lamond) on 21st April. Representatives of the Lancashire textile industry have urged the retention of quotas.

Mr. Allaun: That is not surprising. Will the Minister ensure that we are not forced to comply with the EEC system of yarn imports, as this direct consequence of joining the Common Market would finish off many of the remaining Lancashire cotton mills?

Mr. Noble: As I have said before, we shall be discussing these matters with the EEC in the coming months.

Mr. Joel Barnett: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it would be disastrous for the industry and for employment in it if he waits until after 1st January, 1973 to make a decision? It is vital that he now takes the opportunity to use the powers which are available to him to ensure that quotas are retained, and it is important that he says so at an early stage.

Mr. Noble: Yes, Sir. I said "in the coming months", and I hope to make some progress before January.

Unit Trusts (Management)

Dr. Gilbert: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if, as a result of his review of company law, he will seek powers to end the practice whereby merchant banks and other financial institutions warehouse lines of stock in unit trusts managed by them.

Mr. Noble: I take the hon. Member to mean a practice whereby a merchant bank arranges for a unit trust under its control to acquire shares for whose issue the merchant bank is responsible. If the hon. Member has information to show that the practice has been followed to the prejudice of the unit trust, I will consider it.

Dr. Gilbert: I am grateful for that answer but the right hon. Gentleman has not quite got the point. I am referring to the normal practice whereby merchant banks and other financial institutions can put into a unit trust lines of stock for which they may have subsequent use. Are there not two possibilities for abuse which he may consider: first that there will be an avoidance of disclosure under the 10 per cent. rule; and secondly that serious conflicts of interest can arise in takeover situations whereby stock is voted, not in the interests of ordinary members of the public who subscribe to the unit trusts but in the interests of merchant bankers who control them?

Mr. Noble: I am in some difficulty in answering this question, not because I do not know the answer, but because the phrase used by the hon. Gentleman has no recognised meaning. Therefore, I had


to make the best guess I could about what was behind his Question. As for the point which he put in his supplementary question, I think that in most cases this could not happen because the merchant bank would be acting as principal, and that kind of action would be in breach of the trust deed. If the hon. Gentleman has in mind a particular point and would like to write to me about it, I shall certainly give him a full answer and tell him whether there are actions that we can take.

Rolls-Royce Limited

Mr. Whitehead: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry when he now expects negotiations over the purchase price of the assets of Rolls-Royce Limited to be completed.

Mr. Onslow: This issue has now been referred to an independent expert, and I cannot forecast how long the hearings will take or the time which the expert will need to make his award.

Mr. Whitehead: In the event of a favourable answer to later Questions on the Order Paper in seeking to remove some of the remaining doubts about the future of Rolls-Royce Ltd., may I ask the hon. Gentleman whether he will grasp the point that many thousands of shareholders and worker shareholders, particularly in Derby, cannot see why this matter should drag on for so long without any apparent indication of when it is to be resolved?

Mr. Onslow: The hon. Gentleman will not expect me to anticipate answers to later Questions on the Paper, but I must say that in this case there is no question other than that very large sums of money are involved. It is clearly right that the determination should be done in the most painstaking way, even though all parties involved are conscious of the need for speed.

Mr. Rost: Since an initial payment of £30 million has been made, and in view of the delay in negotiations continuing, will my hon. Friend agree to the making of a further interim payment so that creditors at least can have partial distribution from the liquidator?

Mr. Onslow: My hon. Friend will remember that I told him earlier this year

that the liquidator hopes to be able to make an interim distribution of at least 10 per cent. this autumn. I cannot take his point about a further interim payment.

Quiet Jet Aircraft Engine

Mr. Walter Johnson: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what plans the Government now have for giving financial assistance to the aircraft industry to enable it further to develop a quiet jet aircraft engine.

Mr. Onslow: The House is already familiar with the support which is at present being given to the RB211 engine. In addition we are negotiating with the industry with a view to giving some support to a programme, based on this engine, aimed at demonstrating some further noise reduction techniques.

Mr. Johnson: Is the Minister aware that, as he himself has indicated, great strides have already been made in this direction with the RB211 engine? Surely we owe it to the people who live near airports to make funds available to the aircraft industry for the further development of quieter engines.

Mr. Onslow: I agree that this is a most important matter. The hon. Gentleman may like to know that initial work on the RB211 is aimed at a reduction of 5 EPNdB over the present noise level, which should halve the number of people around airports adversely affected by noise from this aircraft.

Mr. Jessel: Is my hon. Friend aware that positive discrimination in favour of the manufacturers of quieter engines will be welcomed in many parts of the House?

Mr. Onslow: The most important thing to do is to encourage operators to buy quiet aircraft.

Mr. Mason: Since it is recognised that the development of the RB211 and the TriStar are paving the way to quieter aircraft, can the Minister say what technical progress is now being made towards the development of a quieter engine for the aircraft which will be continually in use after the present generation of aircraft, namely, the Concorde?

Mr. Onslow: The right hon. Gentleman knows that the Government are devoting great effort to reducing the noise of the


prototype engines fitted in Concorde. As he has more than once been told, it is the forecast that Concorde when in service will compare with existing noise levels in long-range jets.

European Economic Community

Mr. Meacher: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will make a statement concerning negotiations with the European Economic Community over trade liberalisation.

Mr. John Davies: During the accession negotiations last year, agreement was reached on transitional arrangements for our implementation of the Community regulations embodying the common liberalisation lists, consisting of items which are free of quantitative restrictions in all six member States. During this year we are consulted under the interim procedure about proposed additions to the lists.

Mr. Meacher: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that in 1971 France, under trade liberalisation agreements, imported not one ounce of cotton yarn from Asia while Britain under her quota arrangements imported £160 million worth of textiles from Asia? Once quotas are off in the EEC, does the Minister intend Britain to use the trade frustration tactics employed on the Continent? If not, how does he intend to prevent 20.000 jobs in the cotton yarn spinning industry from being wiped out?

Mr. Davies: I am very concerned about the industry in Lancashire. However, it is not helpful simply to make general charges about the administrative and, inferentially, underhand methods used by other countries to avoid imports. If hon. Members have specific examples which they can bring to my attention, I hope they will do so.

Mr. Biffen: Will my right hon. Friend say whether the Government intend to use prospective membership of the Community as a means of encouraging trade liberalisation with the developing countries of UNCTAD?

Mr. Davies: The generalised preference scheme in which we have been quite the forefront operator is one which we shall seek to pursue, though it will need some major adaptation so that there will

be harmony between the acceding countries and the existing six members of the Community. There will have to be adaptation, but the purpose of that liberalisation and all that lies behind it will endure.

Post-Apollo Programme

Mr. Dalyell: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what discussions he has had with the British Aircraft Corporation on the subject of British participation in the post-Apollo programme.

Mr. Onslow: The Department is in close touch with the United Kingdom space industry, including the British Aircraft Corporation, on the subject of participation in the post-Apollo programme. The views expressed to us by industry are fully taken into account during discussions with our European partners on the merits of participation.

Mr. Dalyell: In the light of the most recent discussions with the British Aircraft Corporation, would the Department care to modify in any way the advice it gave to the Prime Minister in answering a Question from me that perhaps high technology was not involved in what is now offered by the Americans?

Mr. Onslow: I think that advice was correct.

Mr. Dalyell: No, it was not.

Mr. Onslow: The hon. Gentleman disagrees with me but I adhere to the view that the advice given was correct and that the differences in technology undoubtedly placed the original work in which we might have had a chance of participating very much higher than that which has been left by the latest American decision.

Mr. Wilkinson: Does my hon. Friend agree that the success of North American Rothwell in obtaining a contract for the Orbiter vehicle puts BAC of all the European manufacturers in a supreme position to get an advantageous contract, if only the Government will go ahead?

Mr. Onslow: I see that the hon. Gentleman has on the Order Paper a later Question on this subject.

Leather (Imports)

Mr. Wall: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what action is being taken to protect the British leather industry against unfair foreign competition.

Mr. Noble: Import duties on most leather from developing countries were suspended at the beginning of 1972 under the UNCTAD generalised system of preferences scheme. The industry has just applied for them to be reimposed on certain imports and I am considering the matter urgently.

Mr. Wall: Will my right hon. Friend bear in mind especially imports from South American countries where there are highly protected and developed tanning industries? Will he consider restricting the export of domestic raw hides to 10 per cent. of last year's kill as is done by countries such as West Germany and others?

Mr. Noble: I met a deputation from the tanning industry a few days ago. I am considering its representations to me. My hon. Friend is correct. The Argentine, Brazil, Colombia, Uruguay, Mexico, Yugoslavia and South Korea have all tended to be restrictive in their leather exports.

Mr. Maclennan: Has the right hon. Gentleman now had from the industry the representations about which he spoke to me, especially in regard to the effect on our domestic manufacturing industry of the importation of dumped goods from Hong Kong?

Mr. Noble: Yes. I have a certain amount of information, and the formal application was made to me on 24th July.

Coal (Gasification)

Mr. Eadie: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will name the 11 United States companies which are to join in a £2 million experiment in Scotland aimed at developing gas from coal as a substitute for natural gas, a project for which his approval is required.

Mr. Tom Boardman: My approval is not required for this experiment. I will however circulate in the OFFICIAL REPORT

the names of the companies which I understand to be associated with it.

Mr. Eadie: The hon. Gentleman must be aware that investments leading to jobs are welcome in job-hungry Scotland. Can he say what rôle the Gas Council plays in this project? Will it have any patent rights, or will it have to depend on the benevolence of the 11 American companies if the project is successful?

Mr. Boardman: I too welcome the jobs that it provides. The Gas Council has been able to come to this arrangement which involves the use of capacity surplus to its requirements. The Gas Council indirectly will benefit from these experiments. Therefore from all points of view it is welcome.

Following is the information:
Arrangements with the Scottish Gas Board and the Gas Council have been made by the Conoco Methanation Company, with whom the following other companies are understood to be associated in the experiment:

Amax Coal Company
Cities Service Gas Company
Colorado Interstate Corporation
Columbia Gas System Corporation
Gulf Oil Corporation
Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America
Northern Natural Gas Company
Panhandle Eastern Pipeline Company,
jointly with the Peabody Coal Company
Rocky Mountain Energy Company
Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Company.

Industrial Development (London)

Mr. Thomas Cox: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry if he will give the number of new industrial industries which have been established in the inner London area in the last three years.

Mr. Anthony Grant: I regret that the information in the form requested is not readily available.

Mr. Cox: While I take note of that reply, I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is aware of the deep concern now being expressed throughout London about the continual closure of industries and about the thousands of jobs that we continue to lose. In view of the reply that I was given last week about IDCs, will the hon. Gentleman seek an urgent meeting with the representatives of the 32 London boroughs so that this matter may be discussed with a view to putting forward


proposals for the re-establishment of industries in London?

Mr. Grant: I am always willing to consider requests for discussions. However I must point out to the hon. Gentleman that the loss of job opportunities in manufacturing industry in London has been offset by the growth of job opportunities in service industries and in commerce, which is not a state of affairs that the rest of the country enjoys.

Mr. Bruce-Gardyne: Can my hon. Friend say whether he has received representations to the effect that greater London should be converted into a special development area?

Mr. Grant: No, Sir.

Inflatable Craft (Marine Hazards)

Mr. Judd: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will establish an inquiry into the hazards and accidents at sea involving floating air beds and other inflatable craft; and whether he will make a statement.

Mr. Onslow: The dangers of using airbeds and unsuitable craft in the sea should be generally well known, particularly to parents of young children, but we are keeping this problem under review to see whether further action is needed.

Mr. Judd: Quite apart from the dangers to those using these craft, especially to young children, does the hon. Gentleman agree that there is considerable danger and inconvenience to the public services involved in rescue operations, in addition to the considerable public expense involved? Would not a thorough inquiry be helpful from every angle?

Mr. Onslow: I think the hon. Gentleman will recognise that the rescue services are prepared to put up with considerable danger and inconvenience if it means saving lives. When accidents are caused by articles which are no more than floating toys, I think any sensible parent should see that no child is allowed to drift from the shore in one of them.

Mr. Wilkinson: As it is possible for the unfortunate victim to travel a great distance and rapidly to become out of earshot and hard to discover, and as the cost of launching air-sea rescue heli-

copters under RN or RAF auspices is very high, will the Department examine the possibility of supporting an institution like the American Civil Air Patrol which might be of great value as an auxiliary air-sea rescue service?

Mr. Onslow: I will look at that suggestion. However it is still my view that prevention is more important than cure. I hope that parents will take my warning very much to heart, especially at this time of year.

RB211 Engine and TriStar Aircraft

Mr. Jessel: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how much noise is made by Lockheed TriStars.

Mr. Onslow: Under the conditions specified by the United States Federal Aviation Regulations, the noise levels in EPNdB for a Lockheed TriStar are: flyover 98; sideline 95; approach 103.

Mr. Jessel: Will my right hon. Friend say how these figures compare with those for other engines? Will he also consider, further to his reply to my supplementary question on Question No. 17, what action can be taken to encourage airlines to buy aircraft with quieter engines?

Mr. Onslow: My hon. Friend may know that new certification regulations have been introduced which impose limitations on the noise which may he made by aircraft coming forward for registration now. As for my hon. Friend's first point about comparative performances, since it is the aircraft with all its engines which matters, the TriStar is quieter than the average of the present generation of four-engined aircraft—the 707, the DC8 and the VC10—by about 15 EPNdB at end of the three measuring points. Even compared with the average of the much smaller Trident 3B and the BAC 111–500, it is quieter by between 5 and 12 EPNdB at the various measuring points.

Mr. Maxwell-Hyslop: As the certification requirements are that an aircraft shall be safe on take-off if one engine fails, will my hon. Friend confirm that a twin-engined aircraft has a higher rate of climb than a three-engined aircraft and, therefore, that the noise on the ground after take-off diminishes more quickly with twin-engined aircraft than with three or four-engined aircraft?

Mr. Onslow: I have no doubt that my hon. Friend is correct about these technical matters. However for comparative purposes the noise of various types compared with the TriStar is as I gave in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Mr. Jessel).

Mr. Hugh Jenkins: How do these noise figures compare with the present noise level of the Concorde and that hoped for in the future?

Mr. Onslow: Noise figures on the Concorde have been given already. If the hon. Member for Putney (Mr. Hugh Jenkins) cares to put down a Question, I shall answer it again.

Mr. Michael McNair-Wilson: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he is now able to state when the British Airways Board will place an order for TriStar aircraft for British European Airways.

Mr. Walter Johnson: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what advice the British Airways Board have given to British European Airways concerning the purchase of the Lockheed airbus powered by Rolls-Royce RB211 engines.

Mr. Whitehead: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he can now announce the Government's decision regarding funding an uprated version of the RB211 engine, as proposed by Rolls-Royce (1971) Limited.

Mr. Millan: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what discussions he has had with the British Airways Board about the purchase of TriStars.

Mr. Onslow: With your permission, Mr. Speaker, my hon. Friend the Minister for Aerospace will answer these Questions at the end of Questions.

Industrial Development Certificates (Derbyshire)

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many industrial development certificates have been granted in Derbyshire, both in

the grey areas and the non-grey areas, since 1st January, 1972.

Mr. Anthony Grant: Between 1st January and 30th June, 1972, 57 in Derbyshire of which 29 were approved outside the intermediate areas.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: Does my hon. Friend accept that there is a certain amount of confusion about the circumstances in which IDCs are given and that there is an underlying uneasiness in Derbyshire that insufficient job opportunities are being given in view of what is happening there? Will my hon. Friend look at the matter with a view to seeing whether the situation can be improved?

Mr. Grant: I take note of the first part of my hon. Friend's supplementary question. Of course, the exact locations of IDCs must be kept confidential. The general picture is much improved since my hon. Friend last asked me about it. Last year the figure was 75, and it shows an encouraging improvement.

Oil Pipe-line Fracture (Staffordshire)

Mr. Golding: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will publish his inspector's report on the fracturing of an oil pipe-line at Ashley, Staffordshire, on 7th July; and whether he will make a statement.

Mr. Tom Boardman: The inspector's report is confidential. I am however arranging to let the hon. Member have a copy of a factual statement which is being made available to interested parties.

Mr. Golding: Is the hon. Genleman aware that this accident revealed a completely unsatisfactory state of affairs in terms of safety? Is he aware, further, that his Department is being too secretive about the hazards of conveying both oil and gas? Will he rethink his position and make the full report of the inspector available to the general public?

Mr. Boardman: When the hon. Gentleman sees the factual statement that I have undertaken to let him have and when he bears in mind the reply to his Question on 26th July, I believe he will see that the cause of the accident is identified clearly and that it is established that the emergency procedures proved completely


satisfactory. I think that answers the point the hon. Gentleman wishes to make.

Consumer Protection

Mr. Edward Taylor: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he has yet come to a conclusion as to the attribution of responsibility in his Department for the safeguarding of consumer interests.

Mr. John Davies: The allocation of Ministerial responsibilities within my Department is reviewed from time to time, but I have no announcement to make about this at present.

Mr. Taylor: Will my right hon. Friend assure us that in the next Session more priority will be given to consumer protection legislation? Is he aware that in the Queen's Speech this year we had an assurance that legislation would be forthcoming? We have not had any. Can we at least look forward to legislation on the Crowther proposals and the Sale of Goods Act next year?

Mr. Davies: I will give close attention to my hon. Friend's suggestion.

Mr. Jay: As it is the Government's present practice to reverse their policies of a year ago, will they now re-estabish the Consumer Council?

Mr. Davies: No, I have no intention of doing so at present.

Companies (Returns)

Mr Arthur Lewis: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether he will give for the latest and most convenient stated date the number of registered companies which have failed to remit their returns as laid down under the Companies Act; and whether he will classify these in such a way as to show how many of such companies are in arrears with such returns for periods between six months and 12 months, 12 months and 18 months, 18 months and two years and more than two years.

Mr. Noble: Until the process of computerising these records, which is now under way, is complete, it will not be possible to answer this Question without disproportionate cost.

Mr. Lewis: Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that that proves that there

must be so many hundreds of these cases that his Department cannot find them without disproportionate time and effort? If that is so, why are these people allowed continually to break the law year after year, whereas when it comes to the dockers within a matter of hours the full majesty of the law is set in train and every action is taken? Will the right hon. Gentleman take action to ensure that the law is enforced against these lawbreakers?

Mr. Noble: I heard that argument early one morning last week.

Mr. Lewis: The right hon. Gentleman will hear it again on the Motion for the Adjournment.

Mr. Noble: The hon. Gentleman has, as I said then, my sympathy in that this is an enormous problem. It has been building up over the years.

Mr. Lewis: Do something about it.

Mr. Noble: We are at present, as I have said to the hon. Gentleman, computerising the whole of this information. It will, on the rate being developed at present, take a year to complete. [Laughter.] The hon. Gentleman laughs but detailed information about ½ million companies cannot be collected in a few minutes—[Interruption.] I am trying to help the hon. Gentleman and to give him the information he seeks. Last year we sent out 130,000 reminders to companies which were, for one reason or another, late. This is a very considerable effort on the part of the staff, and the process will be quicker when it is computerised.

Mr. Benn: The right hon. Gentleman has accidently answered part of the question: he has shown that 100,000 firms are in arrears, or questions would not have been sent to them. He has a statutory obligation to Parliament to give the House information about companies which have not filed their returns. If the information is being computerised, that is a mechanical matter and does not in any way alter the fact that the right hon. Gentleman's Department has the responsibility to keep the House informed about this matter.

Mr. Noble: The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely wrong. I did not give the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) the answer by mistake. I


gave it to him on purpose. I said that 130,000 firms had had reminders that they were late. What I cannot do is answer the hon. Gentleman's Question, which covers an enormous range far beyond the number. This could not be done on the information which at present exists. I am trying to improve the situation as fast as is humanly possible. As the hon. Gentleman had the courtesy to say, this has been building up over the years.

Mr. Blaker: Has my right hon. Friend any information about what the position was in this respect in June, 1970?

Mr. Noble: Approximately the same number of companies and exactly the same action was taken.

Mr. Lewis: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Ardwick (Mr. Kaufman), I will try to raise this matter when opposing the Motion for the Adjournment for the Summer Recess.

Bolton

Mr. Redmond: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry how many inquiries for industrial sites and buildings have been passed to the industrial development officer at Bolton by his Department; how many of these have been from United Kingdom firms and how many from overseas since 1st April, 1972.

Mr. Anthony Grant: In consultation with the industrial development officer, the Department has suggested Bolton in reply to 21 inquiries for factory space, four of which came from overseas.

Mr. Redmond: I thank my hon. Friend for that reply. Was it fair for the delegation from the North-Western Trades Union Congress to issue a statement to the Press after meeting my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State talking about gloom over jobs in the North-West?

Mr. Grant: It is not for me to comment on what statement the deputation made or did not make. All I can say is that the Department and Bolton work extremely well together and there is considerable optimism in my hon. Friend's constituency.

Pyramid Selling

Mr. Raphael Tuck: asked the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry whether, in view of Mr. Justice Megarry's comments in the High Court of Justice that pyramid selling was capable of being operated dishonestly and could amount to swindle of a far-reaching nature, he will, as a matter of urgency, seek powers to make the practice of pyramid selling illegal in Great Britain.

Mr. Noble: I have taken note of the judgment. It relates to the two companies for which winding-up orders have been made. Any wider implications it may have will require further examination. A study of pyramid selling is in hand and I hope shortly to reach decisions on any further measures that may be necessary to regulate the practice.

Mr. Raphael Tuck: Is the Miniser aware that numbers of people have been and are being swindled out of their life savings by slick operators in this field, that the practice has been made illegal in a number of States in the United States and that Mr. Justice Megarry referred to Koscot operating a scheme which reeked of cunning and fraud and was a swindle of a far-reaching nature? Cannot the right hon. Gentleman speed up matters so that more people are not swindled out of their savings? What does he intend to do about it?

Mr. Noble: In this case the Department acted quickly and, I am glad to say, very effectively. There is a large variety of dealings in franchises. The sort that was carried on by Koscot was a particularly bad one. There are variations. They are all being examined. I shall take whatever action is suitable as soon as I can.

Mr. Lipton: Can we have an assurance that the Minister will not computerise this proposition, otherwise it will take at least a year before anything happens?

Mr. Noble: I shall deal with it as quickly as possible. I see no need to use a computer for this purpose.

QUESTIONS TO MINISTERS

Mr. Speaker: The Minister for Aerospace, to answer Question No. 33.

Mr. Eadie: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. The House is aware that there is a great deal of controversy and speculation about the nuclear power industry. Have you had any intimation from the Minister that Question 46 on the nuclear power industry will be answered today?

Mr. Speaker: I have had no such intimation.

Mr. Maclennan: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. An item of news has appeared on the front page of the Financial Times indicating that the Minister was going to make a statement to the effect—

Mr. Speaker: Order. This has nothing to do with the Chair. I had asked the Minister for Aerospace to answer Question 33.

RB211 ENGINE AND TRISTAR AIRCRAFT

The Minister for Aerospace (Mr. Michael Heseltine): With permission, Mr. Speaker, I should like to answer Questions Nos. 33, 44, 50 and 51.
I wish to inform the House that two major decisions have been taken on the RB211 programme. First, we have accepted proposals from Rolls-Royce (1971) Ltd. to develop the engine from 42,000 to 45,000 lb. thrust. Rolls-Royce (1971) estimates the development cost to be £31 million. It will meet 25 per cent. of this from working capital. If the development cost should exceed £31 million it will meet 50 per cent. of any increase up to a total project cost of £61 million. The remaining development costs will be met by the Government. Production costs will be met wholly by Rolls-Royce (1971) and arrangements will be made for recovery of the Government's development contribution.
This stretched engine to be known as the RB211–24 will be used in the first instance in an extended range TriStar—the -2—which Lockheed is determined to develop with a view to introduction into service in 1975. Development of the engine, on which some preliminary

work has been done by Rolls-Royce (1971), will start at once because it will take longer than the modification of the airframe. Continuation of this programme will, of course, depend on a final decision by Lockheed to develop the -2 on which they have already started preliminary work and on the conclusion of satisfactory contractual arrangements between Rolls-Royce(1971)and Lockheed.
Secondly, the British Airways Board has decided that the introduction of the TriStar into its fleet best suits its particular commercial requirement. It has therefore decided, provided Lockheed decides to develop the -2, to place an initial order for six TriStar -1s with an option on six more aircraft which might be -1s or -2s. My right hon. Friend has approved this decision which is primarily one for the commercial judgment of the board.
There are possibilities of a European application of the RB211–24 in versions of the A300B Airbus to which the Hawker Siddeley group is already making a substantial private contribution. I have made it clear to the French Minister of Transport and Rolls-Royce (1971) have made it clear to Aerospatiale that we are very willing to consider specific proposals for suitable applications of the RB211. In doing so I explained to M. Galley my view that for the future it will be essential for European countries to develop a more coordinated procurement policy for aircraft and a more integrated manufacturing capability. I have made clear my readiness to enter into discussions of these wider issues at any time with the French and other European Governments.
I believe that these decisions should give a substantial new impetus to the RB211 programme. They will also play a major rôle in securing the future prospects of Rolls-Royce (1971) which we are determined to maintain as a major manufacturer of aircraft engines in its own right and in due course as part of a wider European grouping.

Mr. McNair-Wilson: I welcome my hon. Friend's announcement, in particular because I know that BEA hoped that it would be allowed to buy this aircraft and, secondly, because it is powered by Rolls-Royce engines. When does my hon.
Friend expect the -1 engine to come into service, is it the intention, when the -2 engine is in service, that both BEA and BOAC should operate the same aircraft in different versions because of the economic savings that will be had from operating the same airframe on the same aero engines?

Mr. Heseltine: I accept my hon. Friend's view that the decision was based upon the decision of the British Airways Board. It is likely that 1974 is the date for the introduction of the -1. I remind my hon. Friend that future acquisitions must be a commercial decision for the board.

Mr. Johnson: Is the hon. Gentleman aware that that statement will be widely welcomed in Derby by Rolls-Royce workers who have had a most anxious and worrying time waiting not only for this decision but the decision of BEA to purchase the TriStar? This order from BEA will go a great deal further and help considerably in the sales of Lockheed, because other airlines have been waiting for BEA to place an order.

Mr. Heseltine: I very much hope that the news will be warmly welcomed by the management and workers of Rolls-Royce wherever they are involved in the production of this engine. As the hon. Gentleman said, it is not just in Derby, but in many other centres, that the news will be welcome. Naturally, in their decision to support this programme the Government are aware of the sales implications.

Mr. Scott-Hopkins: I warmly welcome what my hon. Friend said. It is an excellent statement, from every point of view. Is he able to say a little more about the development of the stretched version? This will not depend, will it, entirely on Lockheed orders being confirmed for the -2 version of the TriStar, but development will go ahead regardless of that?

Mr. Heseltine: The British Airways Board has made its view clear that the decision to order the TriStar -1 is conditional upon Lockheed's going ahead with the -2. It believes that the whole programme should be seen as one, and in the event of Lockheed not deciding to go ahead, although it is that company's

intention to do everything in its power to do so, the British Airways Board will review its position.

Mr. Whitehead: May I add my heartfelt support to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Derby, South (Mr. Walter Johnson) about the Government and the British Airways Board having come round to share the view of the whole aerospace industry on the merits of the RB211 engine? Has the hon. Gentleman any estimate from Lockheed of the potential sales figures for the -2 stretched version? Secondly, is the sum of £60 million which the hon. Gentleman mentioned a finite sum? Thirdly, does that sum include all the development costs of the adaptation of the -24 engine if this should be used in some form for the A300B aircraft?

Mr. Heseltine: It is not right for the hon. Gentleman to suggest that the Government have lately come to support the 211. As he knows, the Government have committed £195 million to the support of the engine, and I should have thought that that was a slight gesture of confidence.
As to future sales, I have seen a number of figures given by the Lockheed Company and one has to take these into account together with any future price which the company may determine on. As the hon. Gentleman knows, Lockheed thought in terms of 220 for the TriStar -1, and now see a substantially higher figure in respect of the -2.
As to the third part of the hon. Gentleman's supplementary question, the initial £60 million deals with the initial six aircraft for which a firm order will be placed by the BAB. In the event of its exercising its option for either the -1 or the -2 for six more aircraft, additional sums will be payable.

Air. Haselhurst: Is it fair to infer from my hon. Friend's statement that he understands the consequences of the decision to Hawker Siddeley who have, as my hon. Friend says, contributed a fair amount of private capital to another project? Is it fair to assume that he recognises that, and is prepared to have negotiations to try to mitigate future consequences?

Mr. Heseltine: I am extremely aware of the consequences of this decision for


Hawker Siddeley, and have had long discussions with Hawker Siddeley and with European colleagues of mine about this decision. That is why I am sure the House will understand my words, which I have carefully chosen in my statement. These make it perfectly clear that I believe there should be on-going discussions with the French and other Governments, which, I believe, should be of an urgent nature, and which should play a part in avoiding this sort of difficulty and conflict in making decisions of this kind in the future.

Mr. Millan: May I also welcome the British Airways Board order which I think is right, particularly as it has been taken on the commercial merits of competing aircraft and not as a result of Government pressure? There seems to be some uncertainty about the development costs of an uprated version of the development engine. The Minister has mentioned figures of £31 million and £61 million: which figure does he think is the likely cost? Further, at the end of his statement the hon. Gentleman suggested that it was the Government's intention to merge Rolls-Royce with the European aeroengine industry. That is a very major statement to be made at the end of an announcement like this. Can he elaborate on it, because if the Government have this in mind we shall have to consider it carefully, and debate it.

Mr. Heseltine: I fully accept the hon. Member's point, and I agree that it was a decision based on the commercial judgment of the British Airways Board. As to his second point about the apparent discrepancy between £31 million and £61 million, Rolls-Royce estimate that to stretch the engine will cost some £31 million and that is a figure with which we are broadly in agreement. It is on that figure that we have agreed to contribute three-quarters of the development cost, expecting Rolls-Royce to find 25 per cent. themselves, but one can never be totally precise about estimates of this kind, as the House will be aware.
I therefore have negotiatetd with Rolls-Royce that if its estimates are wrong there is a very severe financial penalty built into the arrangements, in that the Rolls-Royce contribution rises from 25 per cent. to 50 per cent. for the additional overrun expenses up to a figure of £61

million. It would be perfectly fair to ask why we should not continue that on, and I have to say to the House that I am of the view that if for some extraordinary reason one were to reach figures of that sort in my judgment, it would be beyond Rolls-Royce's capability to meet such expenditure. So it is better to anticipate that situation now rather than have a situation of crisis in the case of that extremely unforeseen circumstance arising.
One other thing I would say is that work on the stretched version of the RB211 involves modifications to about 25 per cent. of the existing engine. Therefore, one ought to have better grounds for confidence in the estimates on this occasion than perhaps on other occasions when one is starting a new engine from scratch.

Mr. Rost: Would my hon. Friend agree that the most significant point in his welcome statement is that the order has come after an independent assssment by the airline and the British Airways Board of the technical and commercial potential of this engine and this aircraft? Is not this a most important pointer towards future orders that are likely to come from other airlines?

Mr. Heseltine: I can only repeat my support for the general argument. This was a decision reached by the BAB in its commercial judgment of its own requirements, and it will be for the companies to develop any arguments that flow from that decision.
Perhaps I may now, Mr. Speaker, answer the third part of the supplementary question put by the hon. Member for Glasgow, Craighton (Mr. Millan) relating to a merger of Rolls-Royce with a European aero-engine group. There should be no reading into my statement of any announcement of such a decision. What we have said is that we believe that there is need for an integrated European aero-engine manufacturing industry and that conversations to this end would be extremely profitable, but it would be unthinkable that such a decision should he taken without the House being made fully aware of the circumstances.

Mr. Russell Kerr: Will the Minister pause before counselling his friends on the BAB to look for an allegedly interchangeable aircraft, as suggested by his


hon. Friend the Member for Waltham-stow, East (Mr. Michael McNair-Wilson)? Will he reflect on the fact that more than one airline has had reason to rue such an apparently sensible decision.

Mr. Heseltine: I did ask the British Airways Board to carry out a survey for me as to the economic penalties or advantages of operating a mixed fleet, and I have to tell the House that the board advised me that there would be economic penalties if there were to be such a mixed fleet. That is why it felt unable to recommend a mixed fleet of TriStars and A300Bs.

Mr. Benn: While welcoming the Minister's statement, which fully justifies the original decision to go ahead with the RB211, I should like to ask one or two questions. First, why have the Government given support in anticipation of firm orders for the stretched airframe? Second, does the provision for the support he has announced include intramural costs in the gas turbine establishment? Third, will he publish the contract with Rolls-Royce in this case? Fourth, what is the cost of the modification of the A3003 if the engine is put into it? Fifth, will he give an assurance that there will be no forced merger between Rolls-Royce and any European aero-engine company?

Mr. Heseltine: Perhaps I may deal with the last question first, as to a forced merger. I do not think that there would be any purpose in dealing with a totally hyopthetical situation in the circumstances Certainly there are no proposals which would give grounds for answering any questions about them. All one says is that it would be profitable to have discussions such as I outlined in my statement.
The right hon. Gentleman asked why we should move ahead of firm orders. There is a chicken and egg situation here. If one is to be in the business of selling engines or airframes, at some time someone has to take a firm decision. I think that the directors and management of Lockheed take the view equally with the management of Rolls-Royce that in this case the present level of sales is sufficient to enable a decision to be arrived at on the creation of a family of aircraft which is the normal thing in this industry.
As to intramural costs, to my knowledge, and I will write to the right hon. Gentleman if I am wrong, the figures I have given include all the costs involved in the development I have mentioned.
As to publication of the contract with Rolls-Royce, it would not be the intention to publish what is strictly a commercial contract negotiated between Rolls-Royce and Lockheed.
As to the cost of modification of the A300B were it to be fitted with the -24, we have seen, as I understand it, a number of propsals but I think that at this point where there is no firm proposal from any British manufacturer there would be no purpose in going on to one alternative. There may be a number of other alternatives, but I think that on this subject profitable discussion could be held.

UGANDA (BRITISH PASSPORT HOLDERS)

Mr. Richard: (by Private Notice)asked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs whether he will make a statement on recent events in Uganda in relation to holders of United Kingdom passports.

The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Sir Alec Douglas-Home): In a speech to troops on the 4th of August, President Amin is reported to have said that he will ask the British Government to take over responsibility for all Asians in Uganda who are holding British passports, because they are sabotaging the economy of the country.
Our High Commissioner in Uganda has asked to see the President to establish the reason for his statement and to obtain an indication of Ugandan intentions. I now understand that he will see the President on 9th August. We have had no official communication from the Uganda Government. I am in touch with other East African Governments concerned.

Mr. Richard: It is, of course, to be hoped that the meeting on 9th August will clarify the position, but will the Foreign Secretary recognise that the action of the Uganda Government is quite extraordinary, precipitate and irresponsible, if the result of it will be the expulsion of what I think have come to be called


British Asians from Uganda within a period of three months? The United Kingdom has a special responsibility for these people since many of them altered their position upon the word of successive British Governments and such difficulties as they now face, whatever else should be said about them, are certainly not of their making.
As a result of this is there perhaps not a special obligation on our part to treat them humanely and sympathetically in the difficulties that have now arisen? Will the Foreign Secretary consider whether there is not a case for having initiative now, in the event that, unhappily the reports over the weekend about the Uganda Government's position proved to be accurate, to call a conference of East African nations concerned in the problem, together with the United Kingdom and India so that the problem may yet be resolved?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: I am obliged to the hon. and learned Member for his question. He will understand that I cannot make newspaper reports a basis for an answer from this Box. I must wait for President Amin's considered statement. If this action was to be taken, it would be highly irresponsible. We accept a special obligation forthese people who are British passport holders but I would emphasise that there is no other way of dealing with the problem humanely than by the kind of scheme we have, providing an orderly quota arrangement over the years. I can think of no other way. I would consider any necessary meetings on this subject—a conference if need be. It is a little early to be specific about a conference.

Sir D. Renton: These Asians have been well settled in East Africa for a number of generations. Very few of them have ever been to Britain and if they came there would be difficulties in finding homes and jobs for them and in providing educational facilities for their children. Will the Foreign Secretary use his diplomatic skill to save General Amin from a later accusation of blatant racialism?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Yes, these Asians have made Uganda their home. It was precisely for these social reasons stated by my right hon. and learned

Friend that we arranged the quota system, which is pretty generous. It provides for 3,500 passport holders each year with a special arrangement for 1,500 to cover those particularly in need. It is therefore a good arrangement. We shall certainly use all the diplomatic arts to try to get General Amin to alter his mind, supposing he meant what he said.

Mr. Bottomley: These Asians are British citizens and we have a responsibility for them. Did the Foreign Secretary see that the Uganda Foreign Minister is recorded as having said that some might be welcome in Australia and Canada, and has he considered that matter?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: I should have thought it was for the Australian and Canadian Governments to say on a matter such as that. I have already said that we accept responsibility for those people who are British passport holders, but we must insist that the matter is dealt with in an orderly way.

Sir D. Walker-Smith: Will my right hon. Friend say whether General Amin has produced any evidence of what, on the face of it, is an astonishing assertion that these Uganda Asians are in the mass sabotaging the economy of Uganda? Is it not much more probable that they are making a very real contribution to it, and if they are forcibly expelled as a result of any racialist act will not that make Uganda a much less attractive area for international investment and in other ways in the eyes of the world?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Yes, and it the ban is to be proceeded with we, among other countries, would have to review the whole of our economic arrangements with Uganda. Of course, as my right hon. and learned Friend has said, it is the usual experience that Asian communities in Africa bring a lot of business to the country concerned.

Mr. Clinton Davis: I recognise the difficulties that clearly confront the Government and the loathsome racialist nature of President Amin's speech. Is the Foreign Secretary aware that the House will support to the full his recognition of the assurances that were given by successive Governments that we will not renege on assurances we have given to these unfortunate people? Will he


also consider an increase in the number of quota vouchers that will be made available—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—if these people are faced with the consequences of this evil action?
Will the Foreign Secretary recognise that if he listens to some of his hon. Friends the Government and, indeed, this country might be charged with responsibility for the same sort of situation that occurred before the war when a number of Jewish people might have escaped their eventual plight if the Western countries had responded more quickly to their difficulties?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: I have already said that we accept an obligation for these people. This country can in no way be accused of doing other than giving the most generous treatment to these unfortunate people. It is for us and for the other East African countries concerned, and for India if she will, to convince General Amin that this treatment is inhumane and that he must continue the plan we already have or some variant of it.

Mr. Ronald Bell: Will the Foreign Secretary be very wary of the risk of an absurd demand leading to a less absurd compromise and will he ensure in any negotiations that this outburst does not result in any more Indians from this source coming here as immigrants than otherwise would have come? Will he confirm that many if not most of these people were born in India—[HON. MEMBERS: "No."]—and that now they have the same kind of citizenship as they had when they were made subject to the control of the 1962 Act.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: I would hope today that all sides of the House would conspire not to create any panic amongst these people in Africa or they might well decide to come here in great numbers before we have had a chance to exercise diplomatic pressures on General Amin.

Mr. David Steel: I welcome the Foreign Secretary's reaffirmation of our ultimate responsibility for those who are our citizens. Will he confirm that there are two groups of Asians in Uganda—those who are Uganda citizens and those who are United Kingdom citizens? Will he give figures for the two groups? Is

not a fairer analogy the patrial and the non-patrial status of people in this country, and just as it is unthinkable that we should require non-patrials to leave Britain within three months, it is unthinkable to allow another country to treat them in that way?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: There are some 57,000 British citizens in Uganda.

Mr. Hunt: Is it not a fact that a substantial proportion of the Ugandan Asians have already expressed a preference to go to India rather than to come to this country? Does not this underline the importance of the round-table conference, which has already been proposed, and might not that conference also give an opportunity to point out to General Amin the moderate and responsible way in which his neighbours in Kenya have been handling an identical problem in recent times?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Yes, that is why I am in touch with the East African Governments, who have a considerable interest in seeing that this matter is handled in an orderly way. As for the proportion who wish to go to India; I think that I will not get involved in that today: it is a matter of whether the Indian Government will agree to take them.

Mr. Judd: Would the right hon. Gentleman make it absolutely plain that if the reports of General Amin's speech are accurate, no hon. Member in any part of the House would be prepared to condone what is the most obscene racialism imaginable? Would he further appreciate that hon. Members in all parts of the House recognise that we have special responsibilities to these British citizens? Would he take the first opportunity to consult the Commonwealth as a whole on a possible sane solution to this problem and also take the earliest opportunity to make a full and reassuring statement to the House about the specific ways in which we intend to protect the lives, interests and property of these British citizens?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: If this act is carried out, it will be nothing other than a racial action to be condemned. I am certainly willing to make a statement to the House. The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I will not get a report


from the High Commissioner until after the House has risen, but of course I will make a full statement to the House at the earliest possible moment. Whether it will be satisfactory rests elsewhere.

Mr. Deedes: Notwithstanding the latter part of his reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley (Mr. Hunt), does not my right hon. Friend accept that the attitude of the Government of India to this point has not been uncooperative and that it is important that it should remain that way? What action are we taking in that direction?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Yes, Sir. We are in touch with the Government of India about this matter. I have no doubt that the interests of the Government of India are exactly the same as our own—that the matter should be handled in an orderly way.

Mr. George Cunningham: Does not this show how unwise the Prime Minister was to welcome the replacement of Milton Obote by a military dictator capable of doing this kind of thing? Although the situation is wholly the result of the work of the right hon. Gentleman and his right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys), would he acknowledge that the numbers involved are relatively small in relation to the capacity of this country, and would he recognise our responsibility by enlarging our intake?

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Neither the Prime Minister nor anybody else approves or disapproves of a country's choice of Prime Minister or President—we should get into very deep water if we did.
The numbers are comparatively small, but with the size of our immigration programme, this would be a formidable number to take on and it would create the social conditions that some of my hon. Friends described earlier.

QUESTIONS TO MINISTERS

Mr. Wallace: On a point of order. I wish to raise a point of order, Mr. Speaker, that I trust will be of some general interest to the House.
Twice recently I have attempted to put down Questions on consumer protection,

particularly related to my Motion of 10th May, 1971, carried by the House without a Division. On each occasion my Questions have been rejected by the Table Office on the ground that the subject of consumer protection had been recently raised at Question time. On the last occasion I was shown an extract from HANSARD, dated 18th July last, when the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Edward Taylor) asked a supplementary question about the Government's policy for consumer protection. As a result, I accepted the decision of the Table Office. After some discussion and advice, I reworded my Written Question No. 16 on the Order Paper for today.
However, following a report in today s The Guardian, I noted that the hon. Member for Cathcart had put down Oral Question No. 30 on the very subject on which my original Question had been rejected. I am not imputing inefficiency to the Table Office, or criticising it, and I have often been grateful to it, but on this occasion I should be grateful to receive your advice.

Mr. Speaker: The hon. Member was kind enough to give me notice of his intention to raise this subject. Having considered the advice that I have been given and having had notice of what he intended to say and having heard what he has said, I think that I should be wiser to think the matter over. I should therefore like to consider it and to give guidance on another occasion.

Mr. Molloy: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. I wonder whether you could help us. We are in a difficulty with Question Time and it is a difficulty which has gone on for a considerable time. It results from the practice of some Ministers and it has now extended to Members of the Opposition Front Bench. I refer you to a supplementary question when my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason) sought information from a junior Minister and when you very properly reminded the House that it was Question Time. With respect, it seems to some of us that Ministers should be reminded that it is also answer time.
Some of us have been put into difficulty when we have been genuinely seeking answers because some Ministers—not often and even rarely, but sometimes—avoid giving answers. The result has


been that a number of supplementary questions have had to be put to extract information, as such questions were put by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley. You have had to tell the House that only questions must be put, but the logic of that must be that Ministers must honestly attempt to answer. The practice of evading questions has given rise to the difficulty. The result has been that a number of supplementary questions have been put and you have justifiably rebuked us, Mr. Speaker.
I acknowledge, of course, that you always protect the rights of backbenchers but I respectfully ask you to consider stating that it is also answer time.

Mr. Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Member for his help. I was not in any way attempting to rebuke the right hon. Member for Barnsley (Mr. Mason), but pointing out that it was Question Time and not statement time. The right hon. Member was making a series of statements although it was Question Time—and answer time.

EXPENDITURE COMMITTEE

4.6 p.m.

Mr. Edward du Cann: I beg to move,
That this House takes note of the Second Report and the Fifth Special Report from the Expenditure Committee and of the subsequent evidence reported from the Defence and External Affairs Sub-Committee of that Committee.
I make but one observation, without in any way detracting from any of the observations to be made by any hon. Member, particularly my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison), who is the Chairman of the Sub-Committee of the Expenditure Committee which made this report. My observation relates simply to time and I make it chiefly to reinforce a view that I know to be already in the mind of my right hon. Friend and about which the Select Committee on Expenditure will be reporting shortly.
This is the third opportunity that the House has had to debate reports from the Select Committee on Expenditure and at the conclusion of the debate there will have been some one and a half days debating those reports, half of that time having been taken up debating old reports of the previous Estimates Committee. The Expenditure Committee will be reporting its views on this state of affairs in due time. In 18 months we have published 10 reports and it would be a happy idea for the future to have more time for our reports and for the timing to be better arranged.

4.7 p.m.

Colonel Sir Harwood Harrison: I am sure that the whole House will welcome a defence debate in the summer. We usually crowd all our defence debates into the spring and then leave the subject for 11 months of the year. This report is of course from the whole Select Committee on Expenditure, but in fact it is a report of one of its six Sub-Committees, that dealing with defence, of which I have the honour to be Chairman. It was published in February, 1972, just in time for our defence debate, when vigorous comments were made about it.
Hon. Members on both sides of the House who serve on the Expenditure Committee feel that their work is of growing importance. I should like to underline what my right hon. Friend the Member


for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) has said: we hope that in future when planning their legislation for a Session the Government will see that plenty of time is allowed for discussing these reports. More have recently been published on topical subjects which I know would interest the House.
The substance of the report was evidence taken up to last December. The Committee has sat since the report was published, and I am glad that we are today also considering evidence published since. In that evidence we have found some answers to the problems which we met earlier.
I am most grateful to the members of the Sub-Committee, all of whom have experience of the Services of one kind or another. We are all motivated by the well-being of the Services and wish to see, as I am sure the whole House does, that the large Defence Vote is properly and efficiently administered.
The Sub-Committee's report was unanimous—there was never a suggestion of a vote—and it was unanimously endorsed by the whole Expenditure Committee.
We owe great thanks to the Clerks of the House who have helped us. I should also like to record that since the publication of the report we have obtained the services of Brigadier Kenneth Hunt, who had a most distinguished military career and is now a well-known lecturer and writer on military subjects.
We have found in particular that visits have been most rewarding. Since the report was published the Committee has been to Cyprus, an ordnance factory at Leeds, the R.A.F., at Lyneham and naval establishments and dockyards at Portsmouth. We have also been to the new Headquarters, United Kingdom Land Forces at Wilton, which as far as we could see is cutting out a great deal of administrative detail, to the advantage of the Service. A fortnight ago we paid a most interesting visit to HMS "Fife", when she was on manoeuvres up to the north of the country. We were flown up in an executive jet aircraft to Lossiemouth, where all six of us had to don survival suits because we were to go 100 miles in a helicopter. Fortunately, it did not ditch in the sea. We were winched down to HMS "Fife" which was a novel experience, and spent five hours there.
We saw the firing of missiles, including the Seacat, and then returned to London.
An outstanding factor these days is that the pay and allowances of our troops are absorbing a higher percentage of the Defence Vote than ever—over 50 per cent. No one will quarrel with that. Both rates of pay and terms of service have been brought on to a footing comparable to civilian life. Many more men can live out of barracks, for example, and this is welcomed by all ranks. But the higher percentage taken up by pay and allowances means that there is a smaller percentage to spend on weapons, and all the time weapons are becoming more sophisticated and complicated. Money spent on weapons must be scrutinised even more carefully if the Vote is to remain constant, or even if it is to be an increasing figure as a percentage of the increasing gross national product.
Every hon. Member will agree that the setting up of the Defence Department was a right and forward-looking step. Although the three Services have kept their identity and their tasks are very different, there is much and increasing common ground, particularly in research for modern armaments. We feel that the Committee's task is to keep pushing to find more common ground. This may be over training and courses, for example.
The report covered the first half of an overall survey which we have made of the Services. We are just completing our evidence for the second half, and we hope that this will be published at the end of November. We have only recently received the Minister's comments on our report and recommendations of last February. We realise that it takes him some time to work them out, and we posed certain problems to him, but we hope that the period of five months which the answers have taken can be cut down in future. The comments have been available in the Vote Office only for the past fortnight. If we publish at the end of November, we hope most strongly that we shall receive the Minister's comments on our recommendations before the defence debates next spring.
I should like particularly to draw the attention of the House to paragraph 31, headed "Standardisation", because it concerns not only our defence services but the whole House and the whole


nation. We say in it that we could reduce costs if there were more standardisation of equipment between the NATO allies. We add:
The Sub-Committee were very concerned about the virtual absence of progress in this direction and questioned the Secretary of State who admitted that 'one of the most disappointing aspects of NATO since 1949 has been the lack of any real advice in the standardisation of weapons.' A certain amount has been achieved but the obstances are formidable and well known. Some countries can afford more sophisticated weapons than others. Different countries have different requirements and tactical assumptions.…The Secretary of State told the Sub-Committee that collaborative projects with more than two or three countries were inclined to break down and that projects such as the multi-rôle combat aircraft, the Jaguar, and the Anglo-French helicopter, which could then be sold to other NATO allies, were the best way. There is, of course, no need to stress the importance of selling British equipment, too, whenever possible.
There is now a very important section of the Defence Department selling British equipment. I recommend to hon. Members a fine exhibition in a hall within the Department of the goods that firms can sell.
I turn to the comments on the various suggestions we made. Our first recommendation was about the existing security classification procedure. We were very grateful for the comments of the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, who gave evidence to the Sub-Committee on 9th May. This has helped to clarify the situation. All members of the Committee are conscious that there are matters of vital security which obviously cannot be published, but they feel that knowing what many of them are has enabled them to have a clearer and more valuable view of defence problems. There are now nine hack benchers who have this understanding, and we think that we can play a more valuable part in our debates as a result.
In our report there are asterisks in innumerable places. We thought at the time that perhaps it should have been possible to publish a little more information. We wanted to be certain that nothing was scheduled as classified and secret which was already known and published in foreign journals on defence matters. Nor, too, should classification be a cloak for inefficiency. I do not think for a moment that it is, but there might well

be a temptation. I know that when we write our second report in the next few weeks we shall have the willing co-operation of the Permanent Under-Secretary, who promised to help us to cut down the number of blanks, and possibly to have another turn of phrase. We are most grateful to him for the help we have been given, and for the reply.

Mr. Tam Dalyell: Those of us who were not on the Sub-Committee might be curious to know whether the hon. and gallant Gentleman, as chairman, tried at any time to insist to the Department that something that was starred should not be starred. Would he care to tell the House whether there was any disagreement, and what happened?

Sir H. Harrison: I would not say that there was any disagreement. The matter was more general. The hon. Gentleman must realise that the Permanent Under-Secretary gave evidence after we published the report. We feel that we are now much closer together, and that we shall be able to give a better second report, which we hope to publish in November. But I think that my colleagues would agree with me when I say that we felt it right to push this point and ourselves to get the information and get as much of it published as possible, except, of course, that which was critical to the country.
Our second recommendation was that more figures should be available to the Sub-Committee. We are very glad to note the comment that the Minister has reconsidered not only giving a breakdown of expenditure under the 57 headings for the current Estimates year and the year immediately following. In future it will be for four years under the 57 headings. This will be a great help to the Committee, as well as to hon. Members generally and to the country. It will mean that they will be able to look back and see the out-turn. We are also very interested in paragraph C of the observation on the forecast of major approved weapon projects which the Committee is examining. Perhaps my right hon. Friend could take this a little further. We were told in evidence that many projects take 15 years to come to fruition and the expenditure on them has to be decided at intervals. The Committee already realises that it is possible that one could get a


period of perhaps five or six years ahead when this could escalate very much in a few years and then fall off again.
We have recently had the good fortune of hearing evidence from Mr. Rayner, of the Procurement Executive. The Procurement Executive was set up following his excellent report. As a result, far more detailed study and costing, we understand, will be given to this very important side and we trust that the Committee will get these long-range forecasts, not just in a global sum but for the individual projects.
I am sure that I speak for the Committee as a whole when I say that we were most impressed with Mr. Rayner, his outlook, his grasp of essentials and the way that the Procurement Executive has been set up. He realises the importance of both time and money. We were naturally sorry to hear that he will be returning to industry by Christmas.
I turn now to our third recommendation and the comments. My Committee, when visiting Germany, was staggered to find the large amount of time and money spent on the dependants and families of Service men—padres, welfare officers, wives and others have all played an admirable part in this. A very large proportion of the defence budget which the public naturally thought was going on armaments or pay was in fact going on health, education and welfare of ordinary civilians. Whilst we agree that absolute control should not be taken away from the Ministry of Defence, we feel that there should be a greater appreciation of where 5 or 10 or 15 per cent. of the defence Vote is going—that is, on civilian needs. We have subsequently heard that military hospitals are used by National Health patients and it is very debatable whether a full and appropriate charge has been made for them.
We are delighted to see that 12 extra Soldiers, Sailors and Airmens' Families Association nursing sisters have been authorised following our visit to BAOR, and it is reported that they are doing most excellent work.
We found that bus services were not altogether good for those quartered a long way away, and these are being looked at. Also—and this is vital to the troops—the relaying of British televi-

sion services is being looked at. En Cyprus, perhaps because it is so much further away, no one raised with us the lack of television but we found it a real need in Germany.
Next, I turn to recommendation 5. Although I accept the observations and that improvements are being made, there is still a lot of paper work which may be unnecessary. Perhaps the Minister would expand on the sentence about the activities of the newly created Directorate-General of Internal Audit. Our concern here, endorsed by the Commander-in-Chief, RAF, in Germany, was to cut out the needless letter work over small losses going back to the Ministry of Defence. The Commander, British Forces Near East, and the General Officer Commanding, near East Land Forces, both felt that although the amount of paper work at their level was not excessive their powers of write-off should be increased and more particularly that the powers of write-off of commanding officers at a lower level should be raised. By a lower level, they meant lieut.-colonel and wing-commander upwards. The present powers are £35 for theft, fraud and arson and £100 for other cases. Probably a more realistic figure would be £100 or £200, particularly in view of the depreciation of money. We fully admit that a proper system of control is needed, but do not let us waste time on tiny details and miss some of the bigger ones. As we say in our report, having properly qualified accountants is always valuable.
I will say nothing about married quarters in Germany as another member of my Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Mr. Tilney) is particularly knowledgeable on this point and hopes to catch the eye of the Chair in the debate.
I am concerned about recommendation 8, that more consideration will not be given to the use of helicopters in Germany in substitution for vehicles many of which are now old. I hope that there may be a little reconsideration of this and, coupled with helicopters, possibly the use of hovercraft. We were glad to see that their use was now being considered at Wilton. I should like to know that these have not altogether been abandoned.
Recommendation 9, concerning the question of spare parts, raises what is always a difficult problem. I am glad that the Ministry is fully conscious of this. Computer simulation is being studied but the Ministry must never be satisfied; it must be continually probing around.
In regard to recommendation 10, now that we have one Ministry of Defence we feel that the three Services can combine under one Command Secretary. This has happened in many places and it should also happen in Germany. Even if these are minor difficulties, it could well be under the control of one man, with perhaps a special section for the Royal Air Force, which is so much smaller in numbers.
We are grateful for these observations. If they are carried out, as they may well be, our Services will be more efficient and happier. We are sure that much money as well will be saved. We were most impressed with the fine spirit of all our Services and the men and women in them. They believe that they are doing a first-rate job, as indeed they are. It was gratifying to find recently that when a poll was taken of our civilian population, the majority thought that our Services were very essential and good. Until the world is a far more peaceful place it is on our Services' efficiency and determination that the peace is kept. We are grateful to them.
I should also like to mention all those civilians, apt to be forgotten, who work in one section or another of the Ministry helping to keep our Services efficient. They include civilians in the Ministry of Defence at all levels, the non-industrial and industrial civil servants in the Royal Ordnance factories and dockyards, and the civilians employed in camps and barracks.
The Army today is living under peacetime conditions at home and in Germany —this is not the time to discuss Northern Ireland. However, the Army can quickly mobilise as a fighting force. The more determined it looks, the less likely that is to have to happen.

4.30 p.m.

Mr. Roy Hattersley: It falls to me to have the good fortune to be the first Member of

the House to congratulate the Sub-Committee and its Chairman and the Committee as a whole on what I regard as a special, indeed spectacular and in some ways an epoch-making piece of work. Despite that the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) who was Chairman of the Sub-Committee will understand that his report presents the House with the substantial temptation. The report is not very much wider than matters of expenditure but the evidence is. Indeed, the evidence is so wide and the spectrum it covers so diverse that the House would be within its rules of order were it to debate virtually any aspect of defence policy.
There may be hon. Members who will make no complaint about that; there may be some who will take advantage of it. I intend to restrict myself pretty closely to defence costs, but before doing so I want to refer to the other major element in the report—certainly a major element if the Sub-Committee is intending to carry on according to the programme it specifies—namely, the ruling on security classification and the evidence which it is entitled and enabled to publish according to its agreement with the Ministry of Defence.
I hope I do the report justice—I intend to pay it a compliment—when I say that were I to choose a single sentence from it which summarised its attitude I would choose that which appears in paragraph 6 and reads:
…the sub-Committee are convinced that the Ministry of Defence has nothing to fear from a freer discussion over Defence expenditure and that greater disclosure would lead to more informed debate.
I certainly share that view. I shared that view when I was a Minister in the Ministry of Defence but then, as now, I went further. I believe that the Ministry has a great deal to gain from wider and freer discussion and disclosure of such matters. That becomes increasingly evident if we look at this against the realistic background which the Ministry of Defence and the defence establishment are bound to find in the next decade. Whatever Government is in power between now and the early 1980s the defence budget will be under enormous pressure. Personnel and equipment costs will rise. The resources with which to meet those rising costs will grow


increasingly scarce. Not only that, but taxpayers are increasingly likely to expect explanations and justifications of the expenditure which they finance.
The days have permanently gone when people said "If the defence establishment believes that this expenditure is necessary then we will willingly finance it." The defence establishment—and in this context I do not mean the Minister and the serving officers; I mean all those who take some sort of interest in defence matters—has to justify theories, justify and explain our practices, too. Unless that happens the essential support that is needed will not be forthcoming.
That process of explanation and justification has to begin with the Ministry of Defence taking a much more relaxed view about the sort of information it gives out. In that context I say in parenthesis that one part of the report which I regretted, not for its content but for what some people will regard as being its implication is paragraph 17 on page 11. This refers to the very first question the Sub-Committee asked of the first witness. That paragraph could be read to imply that the strategy of flexible response is in part the result of needs to meet a limited budget.
One could perhaps even read into that that it was decided upon as a cheap strategy or a cheaper strategy than the one it superseded. We have to consider the defence budget against the opposite judgment. Wisely in my view, we decided to supersede the doctrine of the trip wire with the doctrine of flexible response. That places an additional financial burden upon us. We have chosen the correct but the expensive defence strategy. Having taken that decision we have an overwhelming obligation to demonstrate its value, to defend, explain and justify it as much as possible. In that belief I go on to add my support of a sentence appearing in paragraph 9 which says:
…care must be taken to ensure…that as much information as possible is made available to Parliament, so that those decisions can be properly judged.
I am sure that the Committee and the House is grateful that the Ministry of Defence talked to it with such frankness. The main object of this exercise must be to enable the House of Commons to

debate defence matters with some degree of authority. I very much hope that the suggestion which the Chairman of the Sub-Committee has made, that the Ministry is likely to be much more forthcoming about classification of information, turns out to be correct. As I understand the situation, the encouraging session in which the Permanent Under-Secretary made his last appearance before the Committee pre-dates the writing and publication of the Ministry's response to the recommendation.
Therefore, I think that the Ministry's last word on the confidentiality of information is what it produced in a rather hurriedly constructed document a fortnight ago. If this is its last word I regard it as a rather depressing last word. Its spirit is enhrined in that single sentence which no doubt the person who wrote it intended to be a reproach either to the Committee or to others and which says:
Requests that evidence should not be published are not made without good reason…
I am sure that the Ministry believes that to be so. I know from my experience that the good reasons of the Ministry of Defence for keeping things to itself are not perhaps reasons which the rest of the population would regard as good. I hope that we may hear something from the Minister about that.
Of course if information has to be taken out of the report because of a genuine security need, no one in his right mind would complain about that. I will express my own reservations about how much the niceties of diplomatic convention should result in necessary information being withheld, and that is certainly indicated in some of the paragraphs. I suspect —again I an open to correction—that there are occasions when it is neither security nor diplomatic convention which has resulted in the deletions—nor the Mini-try trying to cover up its deficiencies. I suspect that it is the Ministry being traditionally over-cautious. We cannot afford that if we are to have informed debate and if as a result we are to take the House and the country with us.
By "with us" I do not necessarily mean agreeing with Government plans but at least having the degree of sympathy which comes for understanding. From that we all have a great deal to learn and to gain. More information in particular on the costs side is clearly essential.
That is why the observation 4(a) by the Ministry, which clearly goes a long way to meet the Committee, is the one which the House must welcome the most. By that I mean the provision of a functional analysis of expenditure under 57 headings over four, or, I suppose, sometimes five years, as they appear in the Public Expenditure White Paper.
While I give that an unqualified welcome, we ought to make it clear —by "we" I mean the House as a whole—that in terms of cost that is only the beginning of the guarantees the House needs. For one thing, four years is only a moment in the life of the defence plan. The report points out that the Jaguar aircraft, not yet in service, is already in such a condition that its replacement, which will not fly until the late 1990s, is already being planned. Against that background, four years of figures is a help but not a substantial help. While I express the gratitude of this side of the House for how far the Ministry has gone in that respect there are other things in which it might well go further.

Sir H. Harrison: That is why I made reference to paragraph C. We would on these longer-term projects, require much more information than is given in this answer and we shall certainly, as a Committee, press for this in future.

Mr. Hattersley: I am delighted to hear it. May I suggest two arguments which I am sure the hon. and gallant Gentleman knows very well, as to why it is especially important that the admirable plan should be carried out. For one thing, the normal constraints on spending which are faced by civil Departments do not bite in the same way on the Ministry of Defence. The Ministry in its evidence frankly admits that PPB techniques are difficult to apply in their purest form to defence spending and that it is impossible to quantify the success of the defence input. We do not know how things would have been different had we spent £50 million more or £500 million less. This places a special obligation upon us to provide and understand what information we can, to provide and obtain information so that the situation which operates with paragraph 41 of the report does not operate again. That paragraph has been so bowdlerised

that it is rendered gibberish. There are only two words about which I express surprise—"increased" and "reduced". It astounds me how those indications of attitude were allowed through by the Ministry of Defence scrutineers. Reporting of this sort is almost intolerable and unacceptable if we are to make our judgments and assess the evidence on that basis.
I hope that when the Sub-Committee turns to the second stage of its work under the extraordinarily important agenda which it has announced in the report it will be able to tell us two basic things. First, I hope that it will give a clear indication of when costs are escalating and, if so, whether they are escalating to such a degree that it feels that there is cause for concern. Secondly, it should be allowed to understand and report to the House the alternative spending options. We cannot see these projects in isolation. Unless the Committee is able to tell us not only what is being done and what might happen in terms of the percentage increase in cost but what could happen as an alternative spending programme, much of the importance of the Committee's work is vitiated.
Those new techniques and relaxed attitudes are essential if the next stage of the Committee's work is to be carried out successfully. The next stage—and I mean no discredit to the present stage—covers some areas of even more dramatic importance than those on which today's report is based. I pick out two on which I particularly want to comment. In the evidence published in the bound volume there is some enormously important information about the relative strengths of the Warsaw Pact and NATO forces. I very much welcome the Sub-Committee's intention to examine those figures in more detail because it means that when the House debates the question of mutual and balanced force reductions, as I hope we shall soon—and three weeks ago I was told by the Minister at Question Time how enthusiastically the Government were pursuing this matter—not only will the information in the report we are debating be at our disposal but we shall have a great deal more information which will ensure that our debates are better informed.
A great deal of nonsense has been talked over the last 10 years about the


relative troop strengths of the Warsaw Pact and NATO Forces. Some of the evidence submitted to the Committee—and not least the memorandum of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen)—has helped to clear away some of the misconceptions. We have a great deal further to go if we are to discuss this crucially important topic with information and authority.
Three other items in the published agenda at the end of the report about which something should be said are the Committee's intention to examine the progress on three equipment matters, all of which involve enormous cost; namely, the MRCA project, the cruiser project and the Seawolf/GWS25. All those are not only potentially major items in the defence budget but items which are likely to appear as major elements in the budget at virtually the same moment. There is already a great deal of evidence which suggests that the costs of all three items are beginning to escalate. There are references in the body of the report to escalation in the MRCA costs. I hope that when we debate these matters in the spring next year we shall know a great deal more about the costs than we have known about the costs of other projects which have caused similar difficulty.
May I say in passing that, looking at those three huge items of equipment expenditure, it seems to me inconceivable, desirable though it undoubtedly is, that the Ministry of Defence will essay a major programme of helicopter support for the Harrier force. I am sure that the strategic military arguments for doing that are overwhelming, but I cannot imagine that another major expenditure item on the equipment side will he added to the already escalating and enormous programme.
However, I say to the Minister—and I hope he will be forthcoming on this matter when he replies. If, as we all expect and as some of us fear, there are enormous cost escalations in those three areas, it is in the interests of the Ministry of Defence to give the House and the country some warning rather than present us with an all-too-familiar Ministry of Defence trauma about some apparently sudden increase in costs which makes dramatic defence cuts necessary or

additional budgetary items essential and which places the House in an intolerable position when it must decide whether it votes for cuts or for additional expenditure and what its attitude should be to the future security of Great Britain.
We need to be taken into the Ministry's confidence a great deal earlier than we have been in the past. I therefore hope that the Minister will be able to give me, the Sub-Committee and in fact, the entire Expenditure Committee specific assurances about four things which must happen.
The Sub-Committee says in paragraph 43 of its report that it intends to make a comprehensive review of the costs and completion dates of the MRCA project. It says that it will monitor those things. Will the Committee be able to tell us the results of the monitoring? Secondly, the Committee says that it wants to look at the review of Seawolf. Will it be allowed to do that? Thirdly, the Committee promised to keep the House informed about escalations, or possible escalations, in the costs of the cruiser programme. That promise appears in paragraphs 51 and 52 of its report, and no doubt the Committee wants to keep it. Will the Ministry allow it to do so?
Fourthly, the Committee talks in paragraph 46 of its report about reporting after monitoring the programmes for the hardening of airfields in Germany. Will it be allowed to report, as it clearly intends to do? May I—for the third time in parenthesis—make a plea about this matter to the hon. and gallant Gentleman who is Chairman of the Sub-Committee? I am sure that he is absolutely right to concentrate time and energy on the question of airfield hardening in Germany. However, we often draw a false distinction between the defence needs of airfields in Germany and of airfields in the United Kingdom.

Sir H. Harrison: Is the hon. Gentleman referring to aircraft shelters?

Mr. Hattersley: Yes, we are talking about the same thing. We are talking about the criteria of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe for the right sort of defence for airfields. I hope that when the Committee considers the question of improvements to airfields in Germany it will consider at the same time—for it is


the same problem—the question of improvements for airfields in Great Britain, because in the same way as airfields on the Continent of Europe need defending, so airfields in the United Kingdom need defending. Their problems are sometimes divided, but they are identical. I hope that the Committee will be allowed to consider both matters simultaneously and that it will report to the House on what it has found.
As I have indicated, those three projects will absorb huge sums of defence expenditure. But the report makes clear that within the defence budget they will have to compete—and I mean compete" in the light of the knowledge that both parties believe in the doctrine of defence costs ceiling—with many other demands, the most important being escalating personnel costs, which, as the report makes clear, take more than 52 per cent. of the entire defence budget. That amount is likely to increase within the total.
There is one area in which my hon. Friends and I are anxious that personnel costs should increase; namely, in the costs of remuneration of the lowest-paid civilian workers in the defence establishment. My hon. Friends and I were horrified to learn at Question Time three weeks ago that there has been no substantial increase in pay in this respect since the agreement which was signed in early June, 1970. There will be no complaint from this side of the House about an escalation in that element of costs.
However, a much more substantial amount, in terms of gross totals, of the personnel budget is bound to go on items of Service expenditure—salaries and other matters—which was greatly increased as a result of the military salary review two years ago. That is not simply money handed over in terms of salary but all those improvements in living standards and the rules governing the living standards of our soldiers, sailors and airmen, which were part of the package of the military salary.
I refer specifically to the removal of the bar on young Servicemen getting married. The Commander-in-Chief of BAOR in answer to question 1148 made the point about two particular difficulties he thought were facing his command, and

the first was the tremendous increase in the dependent population and the second was keeping the single soldier happy. I believe that accommodation is centrally and crucially relevant to both these things, married quarters for one and barracks for the other.
That is why I particularly regretted that the plans for improving barracks, about which we were told in the report, were not submitted to the Committee for reasons about which the Minister may like to tell us they were
withheld from publication at the request of the Ministry of Defence".
I suspect—I put it no higher than that—that the Ministry of Defence is now taking substantial steps with some urgency to improve barrack accommodation in Germany, and if this is what would have been revealed had those plans been published it seems to me to have been a wilful act of self-inflicted wounding that we should be in the situation where the barrack accommodation may be improved and yet for some reason—I cannot pretend to know what it is—it was thought that those improvements should not be published and should be kept from the House and the country at large.
Good as those improvements may be—I have no information about them—we shall still have a desperate—I think that a not unfair description—quartering situation in Germany—3,000 families in married quarters, 2,000 in private rentings, which the Sub-Committee felt, from many visits to them, to be totally inadequate. I think the word "squalid" was used about some of them and the word "excessive" about virtually all the rents.
I make no party point about this because I think that every time Committees have inquired into married quarters in Germany they have been critical of the Ministry of Defence. I remember that when I occupied the position which the noble Lord now occupies the then Member for Kingston-upon-Thames had some very hard things to say about some of the quarters in Germany and the way we paid for them and our efficiency or otherwise in managing them. It seems to me that an inquiry is necessary into the way we manage our married quarters on the Continent of Europe. What is very clear is that no matter at whom we should aim the responsibility, no matter who is


responsible for what happens at the moment or who was responsible two years ago, some very unsatisfactory things are now going on. It is unsatisfactory that a soldier may be posted to Germany and may not get a married quarter for the entire time he serves in BAOR.
That seems to me particularly important in the light of what is happening now in the British Army of the Rhine and in Northern Ireland. If a soldier is to be taken virtually every year from Germany and sent to live in intolerable conditions in Northern Ireland and to face an intolerable task in Northern Ireland. It seems to me we have a special obligation to make sure that during those times when he expects to be living with his wife and family in a decent married quarter in a situation appropriate to married life it should be the rule that he does so, and not only sometimes the case.
I say again that one may be able to argue that the Ministry of Defence has not over the recent past been very efficient in providing adequate married quarters in Germany. I do not share this view which the Committee advanced that perhaps we should build our own quarters, but I do very strongly take the view that if we are to carry on with this situation—and I see no alternative to it—of a soldier spending perhaps one-quarter of his theoretical German service in Northern Ireland, this places an added obligation on us to get the married quarters situation right in Germany, and I hope the Minister will tell us what real steps he and his colleagues are taking about that.
If one were to point out two parts of the Sub-Committee's report which were most important in the short-term they would be the attention it focussed on the Germany married quarters situation and on standardisation. The Committee is to be deeply congratulated upon doing so.
Standardisation seems to me one of the ways in which we might in the near future be able to obtain some sort of defence rationalisation which would lower defence costs. I do not know what studies are now going on in the Ministry of Defence but I suspect the Ministry is considering some ways in which there could be standardisation throughout Europe and the opportunities which could be used to cut costs. The emphasis which the

Sub-Committee placed on that is all to the good, and also what it said about better aircraft utilisation through standardisation of services available at airfields. It was staggering at least to me to read how the efficiency of the Royal Air Force in Germany could be so improved by simply making sure that airfields were generally usable by one national air force and another. That seemed to me a point of central and crucial importance.
It is because of the importance of that sort of recommendation that I feel particularly strongly that what the Committee does this year or next year should not be hampered by unnecessary restrictions and over-sensitivity about the security implications of what it says.
I would say one other word to the Minister of State. I hope he will accept it in exactly the spirit in which I say it. If he is to allow, as I know he will, his permanent officials to give evidence to the Committee it should be published, and if he and the Secretary of State will give evidence to the Committee and it is published, there are bound, in a report of 400 pages, to be points at which there appear to be marginal contradictions, and sometimes figures of which one may be right and another wrong, and points where there may be marginal political embarrassments caused by a frank answer. I can assure the Minister that we on this side of the House—I think, both sides of the House—while having political differences over defence, would regard it as violating the spirit of such an investigation if we were just to make cheap political points out of such contradictions. We are deeply enthusiastic that more information of the sort which the Committee has placed before us should be given, and we offer the Minister that assurance. I hope that when the Minister replies he will tell the House frankly that he intends to be as relaxed as he possibly can be about the provision of information in the future.

4.57 p.m.

Major-General Jack d'Avigdor-Goldsmid: I have rightly been told to keep my remarks short. I apologise, therefore, that I shall not follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley), who said a great deal with which I agree.


I should, however, like to support the remarks made by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison), the Chairman of our Sub-Committee, and particularly what he said on rationalisation and standardisation. This point was vividly brought home to the Sub-committee in Germany by the Royal Air Force on the subject of inter-operability. Its aircraft—Harriers, Phantoms, Lightnings—are owned by us and none of our allies, and this means that the only airfields where these aircraft can be serviced, maintained or rearmed are ours, and were there a larger measure of standardisation among our NATO allies in aircraft the overall efficiency would be far greater. This is why we welcomed the introduction of MRCA.
We examined or took evidence about transport aircraft. Although the inter-operability of Hercules and Britannias is a lesser problem one point arose which was a cause of a certain amount of worry. These transport aircraft are scheduled to last throughout the decade, but at the time we shall be faced with their replacement we shall be paying for MRCA as well.
The Sub-Committee was upset by the escalation in cost, the delays, and the failure to interest our NATO allies in the naval surface-to-air missile Seawolf. Rationlisation can cover not only major equipment but minor equipment, training and administration. I have examples to give, but time does not allow me to do so, except for one minor example.
The Sub-Committee was asking about the newly-formed Anzuk brigade group in Singapore, consisting of men from Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The Committee was told that the British contingent was hiring Australian wireless sets because the frequency bands obtainable on our sets were not the same as those obtainable on the Australian ones. This trouble was only temporary, and I understand that that matter will be put right by a new range of wireless sets. Nevertheless this is an illustration of the necessity for standardisation of arms, ammunition, vehicles and equipment in a mixed force.
Early on in our deliberations we took evidence about the reserves. The reserves can be divided into two parts, the TAVR

—the current name for the old Territorial Army—and the reservists, who are men who have completed their colour service but still have a reserve liability. Both bodies have an operational liability for service in Germany.
Certain points worried us about the reservists. They receive no annual training and no practice call-out. The Sub-Committee wondered, in view of the introduction of modern and sophisticated equipment, how up-to-date these men would be without a period of re-training. In an emergency, no one knows what form the war will take or how hurried the call-out will be. The Sub-Committee was worried on that score. How many reservists will receive their call-out telegrams in time? What percentage will be physically fit? No check on physical fitness is kept. Will the time available be sufficient to get the reservists and the TAVR out to Germany in time?
The TAVR is an extremely efficient, well-trained force. The military authorities in Germany and Cyprus when we were there reported favourably on their standards of training. Many had received training overseas. There are three particular points to which I wish to call the attention of the Minister.
The first concerns the call-out of the TAVR. The impression we gained was that there was no partial call-out for the TAVR; it was all or nothing either at a time of war or at a time of preparation for war. For that reason I was delighted to see that the Ulster Defence Regiment, which is a TAVR formation, was called up for 10 days and is serving in Northern Ireland at the moment. I hope that this will mean that in the future a call-out of the TAVR can be partial and not necessarily total and that "emergency" need not necessarily mean war.
My second point concerns the operational role of the TAVR. In Germany the conventional strength of the British Army depends on the Chieftain tank for its hitting power. There is no Chieftain-armed TAVR regiment. It would be difficult to have one because the Chieftain tank is expensive and the areas in this country where it is possible to train on the Chieftain tank and to fire the main armament are limited. We do not want a regiment, but we do want a reserve of Chieftain-trained crew men.
The only other people on whom we can rely are the few reservists who have been trained on the Chieftain. I suggest to the Minister that there should be established a pool of crew men on the lines of a sponsored unit, trained on existing equipment at the Royal Armoured Corps centre or in the Royal Armoured Corps training regiment.
I make one final plea on behalf of the TAVR and the new infantry type units formed last April. The recruiting is going extremely well but their equipment is not on the same scale as the older units, neither is their scale of permanent staff. I realise that it is no use crying for the moon and that the permanent staff cannot be increased, but at limited expense the mobility of the units could be increased by the provision of a few Land Rovers, which would encourage the men enormously.
I leave the Minister with thoughts of further rationalisation, a sympathetic approach to the TAVR, particularly on call-out, and a further look at the effectiveness of the reserves.

5.6 p.m.

Mr. James Boyden: The hon. and gallant Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Major-General Jack d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) was perfectly right to draw attention to the need for standardisation of arms and equipment. A large military and financial dividend is to be gained from standardisation. Two attitudes are required; great political pressure from Ministers in Western European Union and NATO to make standardisation, co-operation and harmonisation possible, and infinite pains and patience to fulfil the detail. I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) and the Chairman of the Sub-Committee, the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) that this is an absolute must for the political leaders of the NATO countries.
I wish to make three points on the general nature of the Committee's proceedings and inquiries. Progress has been made in relation to classified material. It is a precedent that a Committee of the House should be given access to secret material. I agree with the Chairman and with my hon. Friend the Member for Sparkbrook that maximum publicity is in

the interests of the Ministry of Defence. Only in this way can intelligent discussion about military matters take place. That is not against the interests of the Ministry of Defence.
It may appear strange to the outsider that the military commanders whom the Committee interviewed, particularly those in Germany, were very frank in discussing security matters. My experience as an Army Minister was that commanding officers and GOCs never held back on matters of ordinary discipline and ordinary goings-on in which the Minister might be nobbled. But in the Ministry of Defence there grows up a barrier between the real needs of public discussion and over-cautious attitudes towards classifier material. The Permanent Secretary's contribution to our requirement of maximum publicity was helpful. I am sure that the Committee will go on to make still further progress in this.
My mind goes back to what I have always thought of as the Ferranti scandal of 1963–64, when the Government of the day were seriously damaged by certain revelations. Had a more reasonable attitude been taken earlier by Ministers and by the Ministry of Defence much of the scandal and damage to the Government would have been avoided. It is in Ministers' own interests that they should take note of these points.
My second general comment is that it is not always realised by witnesses who appear before the Expenditure Committee that the nature of its inquiries is constructive. It is not setting out to save money at all costs but seeking to make the best use of expenditure for the good of the Department and of the country at large. I sometimes feel that if witnesses understood this attitude, they would give rather better evidence to the Committee. I do not intend this as a criticism of Service commanders who in their evidence showed a complete understanding of the nature of the Committee's task.
My third general comment is that the civilian view of military matters is often very helpful to military commanders. The civilian looks at problems from a different angle, and perhaps from a wider social experience than that possessed by the military commander. A civilian is often able to make constructive suggestions


which are helpful to Parliament, Government and the people who run the Services.
I turn to deal with some of the recommendations. I endorse what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook about married quarters and barracks. This point is dealt with by recommendations (6) and (7) of the Committee's report in paragraph 25. The private hirings in BAOR often are expensive and are situated at a great distance from the centre of activity of the regiment, such as the NAAFI, the club, swimming pool, the gymnasium, which are too far away for young wives, who often do not have motor cars, to take their children to regularly.
I was rather disappointed at the Secretary of State's reply on the provision of buses, and I feel that this calls for a rather more forthright attitude. I cannot understand how "little local difficulties" should be allowed to prevent a complete coverage of those areas where married quarters are away from the centres of unit and regimental activity. One caravan site at Bruggen proved to be an absolute scandal, and I believe it has now been closed. There may be other places like that. I agree entirely with my hon. Friend about the need for better management of married quarters and of the services connected with them.
In my days in the Army Department there was a drive to see that detailed estate management matters were put on the best possible footing, with a proper provision of caretakers and information about how to run married quarters. For example, in some very new married quarters at Aldershot excellent gas and electric central heating systems were installed, but families had little idea how to get the most economic use from them. A little bit of assistance to prime families about these pieces of apparatus would go a long way to cut fuel bills and make families much more content.
Difficulties are often experienced by young married Service wives when they are with their husbands in a foreign country since the wives often have no knowledge of the local language, no experience of life abroad, and little experience of how to bring up families. The young woman who marries the

typical soldier or airman is very young and defenceless in a foreign land and there is a particular need to look after the interests of these young people who may experience difficulties in a foreign country with which they would adequately deal if they were living in a council estate in England. I should like to see better estate management, plus a rather more aggressive attitude in providing welfare facilities in a broad way.
I wish to dissent from the Committee in putting particular stress on the English television service in Germany. This is a very expensive exercise, and I would rather see the money spent on various amenities, such as the provision of swimming pools, better transport facilities and even in the organisation of holidays and excursions. I would put greater emphasis on the learning of a foreign language and providing more social facilities. Some are provided by NAAFI, but the Services themselves need to provide them in a more bountiful and efficient way.
In regard to recommendation (3) relating to defence expenditure on social services, the Secretary of State was right to say:
The standard of these services is of the highest concern to servicemen…
It is an open question whether these services are better to be provided from the Ministry of Defence budget rather than in some other form of budget. The Ministry of Defence properly takes the attitude "It is better for us to look after our own facilities." I feel that it would help the Committee and parliamentary discussion generally if these costs were isolated.

Dame Joan Vickers: Hear, hear.

Mr. Boyden: I am glad that the hon. Lady the Member for Plymouth, Devon-port (Dame Joan Vickers) agrees with me. If this expenditure were isolated, we could then more easily see what was being spent and could press for action if we thought that the expenditure was not adequate.
I am convinced that the cost of providing military salaries and these social services must rise. I deplore the view that is to be found in some Western European Union countries that social expenditure on conscripts is a somewhat


doubtful bargain. In other words, the conscript is a cheap soldier, and this appears to be a basic factor in military expenditure. In Britain we now have a proper military salary and we treat the ordinary serviceman in a proper manner. Since we have a voluntary service scheme, we can only maintain the strength of our Services by concentrating on the topics with which I have been dealing. I very much hope that the Minister of State will say something constructive in his reply about extending the services provided in married quarters and improving the social amenities which are so vital in terms of the key figure in recruiting for the army—namely, the young wife of the soldier.
More must be done in the provision of barracks. In my days in the Ministry of Defence there was some argument about whether soldiers wanted single rooms. It was my impression that unless more was done in providing single rooms in barracks, it could be argued that soldiers did not want these facilities. I gather that there has been some improvement in this direction and I hope that the amenities provided in BAOR for single soldiers will continue to improve.
I turn to another important aspect of Service life, the provision of education. The Service family is particularly vulnerable in this respect since of necessity the family moves around the world. One advantage of a child moving around with his parents is that he has a certain social confidence. I was always surprised when I met Service children to find how easily they stood on their own feet, how friendly they were and how well versed they were in social contacts. But there is no question that there is a decidely negative side to the fact that children have to move around the world, and this is reflected in a loss of educational attainment. These children are sometimes not up to standard in terms of the three R's or GCE requirements and tend to drop behind. In my days I tried to get the Department of Education and Science to apply the Plowden Rules to the local education authority schools which were responsible for a large number of Service children. I was not very satisfied with the enthusiasm that the Department of Education and Science showed for this. I hope that there has been some progress. I shall be grateful if the Minister can say that there has

been a move forward in those areas where the Army certainly is at risk because teachers change very rapidly, because there are very large numbers of Service children and because the general education of younger children especially is disrupted seriously by their constant movement.
Where the Services have complete control, as they do in the Service schools and the apprentice colleges for recruits, the education is first-class. In many cases it is superior to LEA education. This is partly because there is a higher pupil-teacher ratio and because some of the teachers are paid better. If any Minister in the Department of Education and Science tries to fudge off the fact that the pupil-teacher ratio is significant, he or she should look at Service schools. It is because of this fundamental and rather expensive fact that education in the schools controlled by the Services is so good. I do not criticise that. I criticise those LEA areas where because of local difficulties, especially that of movement, the standard of education is not what it should be.
The needs of these social services for the Services arise out of the nature of the Services and are nothing to do with feather-bedding the Service man. One of the aims of this House always should be to see that Service men are in no worse position than their civilian equivalents. It is because of this that I am very pleased with the way in which the Committee has stressed a number of points, with a view to improving the social conditions. The one about the increase in the number of SSAFA sisters was quickly taken up by the Ministry of Defence. But the Ministry of Defence should look at the whole range of social facilities constantly.

Mr. Patrick Wall: While I agree with the hon. Gentleman about social services, may I remind him that the Services exist to fight? They fight with weapons. The more that we spend on social services, the less money we have for weapons. Will the hon. Gentleman agree that all three Services are becoming dangerously deficient in modern weapons? How do we reconcile this contradiction?

Mr. Boyden: Perhaps I might repeat what I was often told by the Army. It is 


that the key to the soldier's good morale and contentment is his wife. Admittedly, sailors used to tell me that they were not so much concerned with the comfort of their quarters so long as they had good weapons. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman can play that one as well.
With a voluntary Army and the difficulties that Service men have to put up with it would be very difficult for Service commanders or the Ministry of Defence to spend too much money in this way. Naturally, the Committee and the Ministry will always look at the cost. But if I am asked whether we should have an English television service in BAOR or spend the money on more active social welfare, I shall go for the latter. It is a fundamental dilemma which worries the WEU members of NATO, but it is one in which I hope the Ministry of Defence will be on the side of the angels by ensuring that the British Service man in terms of both pay and social facilities is never inferior to his civilian equivalent. The Ministry of Defence has a network of civilian advisory authorities and committees. In discussing these matters in a broad, informed way, this House is more likely to reinforce my view than the opposite.

5.25 p.m.

Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: I agree that it is tempting to regard this as a wide defence debate. I intend to resist the temptation, except perhaps to agree with my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) about our troops. He made a point about the big proportion of the Vote which is now spent on pay, allowances and social benefits. Of course our troops earn every penny that they are paid, especially those at present serving in Ulster.
Several hon. Members have spoken about the need for the greater availability of information. Will the hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) agree that a positive security vetting for Members of Parliament would be a useful preliminary before the wide disclosure of this information by the Ministry?

Mr. Hattersley: It is easy for the hon. and gallant Member for Winchester (Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles) and me to

agree about this since, in our different ways, both of us have been through it. I do not regard it as an indignity. But some hon. Members might, and, while I do not share their views, understandably. I think.

Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: I am interested to have that comment.
I wish to make only two points. The first concerns that section of the report which deals with financial planning and control. In the Ministry of Defence there is too much emphasis upon preparations, albeit inadequate ones, for fighting wars rather than on the prevention of wars. One recognises, of course, that the two functions cannot be separated entirely and that the deterrent forces are essentially a part of the prevention of war. Nevertheless, the balance between quality and quantity is too much towards quality and not sufficiently towards quantity.
Enormous complications arise from weapons and equipment being designed for use in conditions of full-scale war, which is not what we are likely to face. The Ministry of Defence has a splendid "staff requirements" system. Each department is circulated, and each adds its own little bit of perfectionism: the end result is a very complicated piece of equipment.
One example is the difficulty about the Harrier in the maritime rôle. It has been flying now for 10 years. But it is still doing trials. According to the latest information, it is now doing "Project Definition". All this adds up to gobbledygook for not spending money, rather than getting on with it and buying some. We do not need to discover all over again whether the Harrier can fly from the decks of ships. We know that it can. Many countries, including the United States, are buying them with that idea in mind.
Another example concerns the new through-deck cruisers. They, too, are now doing project definition. Largely because of the delays, the cost is now estimated at £50 million. I do not like to think what it will be at the end of the decade when we get one or two of these ships.
In the context of quantity versus quality, the action taken to scrap HMS "Eagle" was quite wrong. I was told


about a recent signal—I believe that it was unclassified—from the enthusiasts at present ripping the "Eagle" apart. It ran:
We have now got out her heart and kidneys. We are going on to do a little transplant.
In that connection, what might be termed a Freudian slip is to be found in one passage of the evidence given to the Sub-Committee. The discussion concerned the "Eagle" and the "Ark Royal". In answer to Question 1186 the Sub-Committee was told:
Perhaps I should add the reduction of HMS 'Ark Royal' was repeatedly urged on the Ministry of Defence by SACLANT.
I am sure that the word should be "retention", not "reduction". I hope that the appropriate alteration will be made.

Mr. Wall: May I remind my hon. and gallant Friend that SACLANT also wanted to retain "Eagle"?

Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: I quite agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall).
A different overall control is needed to purge the constipation of the Ministry of Defence's system.
Instead of immensely sophisticated through-deck cruisers, we need much cheaper ships on merchant ship hulls—more ships for the money, more up-to-date, better living conditions, and quite adequate for peacekeeping purposes.
I believe that in each generation some unrecognised battle is fought which sets the pattern for the future, but that nobody realises at the time that this is the pattern for the future. In this generation it was at Cuba in 1962 when President Kennedy had enough information to get on the Hot Line and stop World War III because he had adequate seaborne reconnaissance facilities available to him. After all, missiles can start wars or can continue wars, but they cannot readily and directly prevent wars, whereas surveillance aircraft can do so.
Finally, on this aspect, it is much easier for us politicians to obtain the willing compliance of the taxpayer to spend money on defence if it is for the prevention of war rather than buying what the taxpayer sees as immensely complicated equipment just to keep up with the

Joneses in the armaments race between Super-Powers.
My second point concerns chapter V of the report—the Royal Navy nuclear strategic forces and the general purpose combat forces.
Much of the report is taken up with a comparison between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. The mass of statistics are concerned almost entirely with Europe, with the relative size of divisions, with relative tank strengths, and so forth.
I believe that the Expenditure Committee and the Government have their hands firmly buried in the sands of Europe. I am unhappy that, despite all that was said about East of Suez at the 1970 General Election, the Government show so little concern about the protection of overseas trade. We seem to have followed the late Government's obsession with Europe and to have forgotten the point that defence of the trade is the most fundamental task of the Royal Navy. This has been true through the centuries, but it was never more true than today, when we are faced with about 400 Soviet U-boats distributed world wide.
On page 383, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen), in his very interesting memorandum which is, again, rather preoccupied with Europe, makes a comparison of naval forces and gives the total of Warsaw Pact submarines as 202. The true figure is much nearer 400. I should like to discuss with the hon. Gentleman at a convenient time whether those figures are correct, because I do not think that they are. What sticks in my mind is the statistic that one brand-new nuclear submarine is being delivered to the Soviet Navy every month.
For trade protection we need seaborne aircraft in some shape or form, because shore bases are obviously no longer available. Another Freudian slip appears on page 176. Question No. 1187 states:
…"commitments now to NATO as our bases round the world have contributed to such a great extent".
They have contributed, and I can only agree! But what I think that the shorthand was meant was—
have contracted to such a great extent
To get down to brass tacks, I am glad that the Expenditure Committee in its


future deliberations is to look at the question of cruisers. I am not sure whether it means through-deck cruisers or existing cruisers being converted, because "Blake" and "Tiger" are monstrosities, as the Committee will find.
To sum up on this question, we must get away from our obsession with European waters. We must have shipborne aircraft. New ships must be built to carry them. We must have VSTOL aircraft. I will not tease my hon. Friend any more about Harriers. A conventional ship such as "Blake" or "Tiger" has a range of 10 miles effectively and, therefore, 'an effective area of surveillance or influence of 300 square miles. A ship with a VSTOL capability with aircraft which can fly over and see for themselves can control an area of about 120,000 square miles—400 times as great.
Finally on the question of the Navy, the report says in paragraph 52 that
the nuclear Fleet submarines 'will certainly come to represent the Navy's primary surface strike weapon'".
I put it to the Minister and to the Chairman of the Expenditure Committee that these submarines, valuable though they are, are not effective for trade protection. They are the wrong weapon for trade protection. They are the wrong weapon for conventional war. They can fight wars, but they cannot perform either of these two functions which I have argued are the most important ones.

5.36 p.m.

Mr. Frank Allaun: The Committee members and the civil servants concerned are to be warmly congratulated on their 27 sittings and on the bulky report which emanated from them.
I have the feeling that somewhere within this vast Ministry, with its annual expenditure of £2,854 million, there is brewing another Ferranti-type case, that kind of scandal where an armament manufacturer is double charging several million pounds of its costs. Somewhere in the Ministry, too, there may be weapons which will turn out to cost £100 million and not the £2½ million originally estimated, as happened in the production —or, rather, the non-production—of certain other weapons. This shrewd scrutiny by the Committee will one day bring facts of this kind to light.
Among the eight subjects listed for future investigation or continuing monitoring there are two of great importance

"(3) The relative strengths of the NATO and Warsaw Pact forces.
(4) The multi-rôle combat aircraft."

Even more important, however, is the question which needs to be broached: why should Britain spend a higher proportion of her gross national product on arms than any other country in Western Europe, with the single exception of Portugal which is deeply involved in its colonial wars in Africa?
Last month the Labour Party issued its 50,000-word policy statement. It is remarkable that one of the most vital sections in this statement—that on cuts in military spending—received no mention at all in most newspapers. Perhaps this was because they disliked the idea and tried to bury it. The attention given to cutting a few million pounds off the cost of the Health Service—for example, by imposing prescription charges—should be contrasted with an almost complete silence on defence cuts, where we could effect vast savings.
The question posed—I hope that it will be considered by the Expenditure Committee in future—is: why is Britain spending 5·7 per cent. of her gross national product on arms as against an average of 4·2 per cent. for the other West European NATO Governments? I should like to quote a couple of paragraphs from the Labour statement. It says:
The defence spending of Britain's European NATO allies indicates that we are still carrying a disproportionate amount of the cost in Western Europe…If British defence spending were cut to 4·2 per cent. of the GNP there would be a saving in the order of £600 million".
and in saying that the Labour Party Executive was quoting the noble Lord in a statement that he made in reply to a Question on 25th November of last year. That was his estimate, which I am sure was right.
It continues:
A Labour Government in the 1970s should seek to reduce our defence spending to bring us into line with the existing burden carried by our European allies, a burden which itself might be reduced if the European security talks were successful. The success with which we are able to pursue a policy of defence disarmament will depend very much on our


success in achieving significant progress in the various discussions as part of the negotiations during and in parallel with the European Security Conference.
I believe that that would allow a huge sum each year to be spent on other and better things. I am confident that that proposal will be upheld overwhelmingly this autumn by the Labour Party Conference and will figure in the next election programme of our party.
I should like witnesses at future sessions of the Sub-Committee to answer such questions as, "What is the purpose of this colossal expenditure? Is it to defeat or to deter the Russian forces? What is the evidence that Russia wishes to invade Britain or Western Europe? Did you accept the view of the Labour Defence Minister, the right hon. Member for Leeds, East (Mr. Healey) in his White Papers that there was no likelihood of that taking place?"
A lot more will be heard about this matter of a reducing our proportion of the GNP spent on arms, and therefore one question which I should like to see handled by the Committee is, "In what ways could a reduction of £600 million a year be affected in defence spending phased over, say, three years?"
I suspect that the Government intend to move in the opposite direction for, apart from this year's large increase—the biggest ever in military expenditure in a single year in peacetime—the report says that there will be joint demands towards the end of this decade—a concatenation of them—for the MRCA, for the cruiser programme—at least £50 million each—and for the Sea Wolf plus, possibly, the conversion of Polaris submarines to Poseidon. That is one hell of a concatenation, and I very much doubt whether all those four things are possible and practicable without bursting the budget altogether.
I could suggest several ways of saving £600 million a year—though not if one is involved in all those things—which I should like the Committee, the Minister and, indeed, the House itself, to consider. First, there is £330 million a year spent on military research and development. This is exactly 10 times the amount of Government spending on medical research. Surely, whether the investigations were reported or kept confidential, there

should be a detailed examination by the Committee of where all that research and development money is going.
Secondly, there is the vast spending on the MRCA. There are varying estimates, but I think that it will be in the region of about £1,000 million before the planes are paid for. Thirdly, a major item in spending is the BAOR. Direct spending amounts to £263 million a year, so goodness knows what the indirect spending comes to. Fourthly, there is the size of the Ministry of Defence itself. The report tells us that 52 per cent. of its spending is on personnel. There are 364,000 men and women in uniform, plus 344,000 non-uniformed employees, mainly in the ROFs. In addition, there are those engaged on war work in commercial companies such as Vickers. They must be paid decent wages, with much higher pay for some, most definitely for industrial employees, but I believe that their numbers should be reduced and many of them transferred to civilian work.
That brings me to the other major issues which I urge that the Committee should consider. The Ministry should prepare plans for this switch which would avoid causing unemployment. It can be done, and there are a number of reasons for saying so. First, there have been two high-powered examinations of the subject, one by the United Nations under the chairmanship of Professor Brown of Leeds University and the other by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and they both came to the conclusion that it could be done.
Secondly, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In 1945 9 million men and women who had been in the Armed Forces or in arms factories were switched to civilian employment within nine months without causing unemployment, Surely this smaller switch from a large to a small arms programme can be done far more easily without causing unemployment.
The number of Service men and armament workers involved would be tiny compared with the numbers made redundant in the cotton industry—300,000 in the last 10 years—in the coal mines—about 450,000—or the railways or the steel industry, without much unemployment, at least until a year ago when there were other causes for it.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow-in-Furness (Mr. Booth) has constantly shown, the same amount of money spent on R and D for civilian purposes produces far more employment than is produced by a similar amount spent for military purposes.
One other question into which I should welcome close investigation is the link between high-ranking officers and civil servants who leave the Ministry of Defence and take positions with firms supplying that Department. According to a written reply which I received from the noble Lord last month, no fewer than 105 Service officers and nine senior civil servants at two-star level and above in the Ministry of Defence have joined firms with contractual relationships with the Ministry in the last five years.
I agree that in many cases everything is above board, but I think that the situation could pave the way for corruption. In America it has reached scandalous proportions. One firm alone, General Dynamics, has 186 former high-ranking officers on its staff. Those who leave the Ministry—and this applies in America as in Britain—still have friends in the Ministry. There is also a possible source of corruption in having men in the Ministry awarding profitable contracts to firms which they intend to join later.
The report deals with the relative strength of NATO and the Warsaw Pact forces. At this time, when most British Members of Parliament, certainly on this side of the House, are hoping that the European Security Conference will lead to mutual and balanced force reductions, the more valuable question was that asked by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which asked
What possible reductions, withdrawals, disengagements or methods of control might be acceptable to both sides, so that neither side felt significantly less secure than it does now?
The report is reprinted in the document with which we are dealing today, but it is not dealt with in evidence. I urge that the talent, thought and time of the Committee and the Ministry be now devoted to this question.

5.50 p.m.

Mr. David Walder: I will not follow the hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun).Perhaps it

would be best to say that though on politics and defence matters we sometimes agree, on this occasion we disagree flatly.
Turning to the Select Committee's recommendation on security, one is in the dilemma outlined by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) who said that the report is closely confined whereas the evidence extends over a very wide sphere of defence activities.
One finds in the report particular interest in welfare. I welcome the 12 Ssaffa sisters. There can hardly be an hon. Member who has not at some time had reason to be grateful for their services to constituents. At the same time we have always realised that there is a tremendous need for more of these excellent women carrying out this task. The provision of bus services is another constant problem that exercises an hon. Member on behalf of his constituents, and we have all had letters about school buses.
One aspect that may have been missed out is the provision of transport for married families to centres for medical attention. Many of these families, certainly in BAOR, are a considerable distance from regimental and unit headquarters, and an especially difficult problem is presented at weekends. Married families see all round them highly sophisticated Services and a mechanised Army, and they must sometimes contrast that fact with the lack of perhaps even one bus to take them for what might be minor medical attention over the weekend.
I am not trying to be difficult when I say that I would not argue very strongly for the provision of television for Service families in BAOR. It is significant that one does not get requests for this service when one visits forces further afield than Europe, perhaps because they realise that such provision would cost even more. But if, for instance, at considerable cost, we provided, by some form of relay, television programmes to British Service families in Germany, there could be the danger that it would contribute to cutting them off from the surrounding population and perhaps remove any inducement for them to learn a foreign language. I therefore do not argue so much for using that money for television services: I would sooner see it devoted to other welfare services referred to in the report.


I am glad that one section refers to the single soldier and airman. I know perfectly well that at present Servicemen marry young, and we all know that they have considerable families, but, as a consequence, we sometimes forget that there is still Kipling's "single man in barracks", and forget the lack of facilities for those men. I was struck in, I think, Berlin by the rather old-fashioned barracks. They would have formed an excellent backdrop for a film of a "Good Soldier Schweik" sort of character, but to my mind they did not provide the sort of accommodation that should be provided in 1972.
I turn from particular points to my general observations; and first to the question of security. I do not think that the OFFICIAL REPORT should be without what I consider to be the gem of the report. The passage I refer to is in page xix, and is related to the multi-rôle combat aircraft. It reads:
The Sub-Committee were informed that increased costs were a matter of *** to *** per cent. The original contingency allowance was about *** and it has now been reduced to ***. Unit production cost is estimated at *** at 1970 prices but if research and development costs are taken into account it rises to ***. The heaviest expenditure will come between 1977 and 1984, when it should be between *** and *** a year at 1970 prices, or *** per cent. of the whole defence budget.
We read in the next paragraph that the Ministry of Defence
…have expressed great confidence in this project.
I should have thought that those figures could be provided, not necessarily by reference to foreign journals but by most students of defence matters. I wonder whether any great harm would have been done if the figures had been included? To take an extreme point of view, let us consider the position of our well-known rivals, and possible opponents, the Ruritanians. Can one imagine Colonel Sapt, in the Ruritanian War Office, looking at this report and saying, "My God, those fools the British! We have them at last. They have included the percentages." We live in a deterrence world, a world of SALT negotiations and possible agreements. Might not this sort of what I can only describe as bogus secrecy be pointless or, even worse, counter-productive?
Another point is that this report is a public document. Many of us including, I know, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) would like to see, as the hon. Gentleman himself said in his recent book, more public interest in defence matters, and many of us would like to see greater public participation in discussion. I wonder whether, faced with a document with these strategically placed blanks, the ordinary member of the public would be encouraged even to discuss such matters?
The report only sees the light of day because it is concerned with money rather than with defence. I do not want to arouse the ire of the hon. Member for Salford, East—we must spend within our means—but I sometimes have an uneasy feeling that perhaps in Britain we have not moved from our position in Nelson's time, when frigates, I seem to remember, were curiously armed, not for ballistic reasons but on grounds of governmental meanness. At that time ship captains were paid by the "rate," that is to say, the number of guns on the ship, and if a ship was properly armed the captain had to be paid more.
We have over the years tended to concentrate on the financial approach to the Services. We do that here because I notice further back in the report reference to the Sub-Committee not discussing general matters of defence policy because it is said that those matters are discussed in the House, not for very long periods in each year may I say.
There would be some advantage if we moved away a little from purely monetary considerations. I do not want to go so far as to endeavour to make us all back-bench strategists, because there are dangers in that as well, but we might look upon this report, valuable as it is, as the beginning of a move towards not only better discussion of defence matters in the House but outside. At the same time we might also see the advantage of explaining better to the public the tasks and the purposes of our Armed Forces and also, of course, the possibility of attracting potential entrants.
I hope I have not offended the members of the Committee who spent long hours and considerable energy in compiling the report. I also hope that in those matters I have raised I have also touched upon


matters which, perhaps during their sitting and afterwards, were irritants as well as subjects of concern to them also.

6.0 p.m.

Dr. David Owen: The hon. Member for Clitheroe (Mr David Walder) has concentrated on what I believe to be the central issue before the House. We are debating, as is tradition on Select Committee Reports, with very little party political feeling and it is a chance for the House as whole to express its view on a matter of considerable concern—how we exercise our democratic rights and, in particular, how the House exercises its democratic control over the Forces of the Crown. It is therefore right that on both sides of the House there have been strong expressions of view that we simply must tackle the problem of secrecy and that we must be given far greater detailed information than we have ever been given before. I made my opinion quite clear in an article in the New Scientist recently entitled
Is Secrecy the Enemy of Defence?
In my view it is.
I pay tribute to the fact that the only reasons why we are able to conduct this debate is that the Government saw fit to implement a recommendation of the Select Committee on Procedure and to give the House a Defence Committee which many people have championed and argued in favour of for decades. It is a significant advance. I hope the Minister will be more forthcoming on the whole question of the first recommendation on secrecy than he could be of necessity in the somewhat hurried manner of the official answer. That answer was a civil servant's answer. The choice before the House is a political one. There are the obvious arguments that when in government it is somewhat embarrassing to release more factual information. But the Defence Committee was set up because the present Government committed themselves to it when in opposition. Oppositions have always asked for more information and even the most arrogant Conservatives must accept that the day will come when they will be in Opposition again and I hope therefore that the Government will be far more forthcoming.
This issue is a matter of central importance to the Armed Forces. Going around

the country visiting people in all three Services one is able to see that one of the things that upsets them most is that they do not feel that over the years the House has even had anywhere near enough basic information and understanding about the problems of defence. Frankly, many of them are contemptuous of the way we discuss their affairs and many senior officers want us to be more probing and critical. They accept that a more informed House of Commons may be embarrassing and may make decisions they do not like. but they feel that it would improve the whole position of the Services and the quality of debate. This. therefore, is an issue on which we must push the Government. Anyone who has read the evidence of 9th May when Sir James Dunnett, the Permanent Secretary, came before the Committee will feel that the Ministry has taken on board many of the criticisms. Sir James is a very distinguished civil servant and he will have considered the questions raised in the Committee's report and hon. Members will appreciate that. But more important was the understanding he showed in replying to questions on the advantages to the Ministry of Defence of more information being revealed.
The Committee's mandate is quite clearly to look at policy and it is not limited in any way to narrow accountancy and expenditure. It was central to the way the Committee was set up that it should look at forward expenditure, and it cannot do that in respect of a period five or 10 years hence without looking at policy. I hope in future work that the Committee will look outside the Ministry of Defence and call in those outside experts from this country and from other parts. We would not he serving the interests of the House if we confined debate to matters served up by serving officers and civil servants.
The key question is of the real quantity of resources absorbed by military expenditure, the real cost of this expenditure, whether rising or falling. Real cost must take account of the quantity of civil output which has been forgone. There is a great deal in the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) that we must look at the whole question of the percentage of GNP devoted to defence not just by this country but by our European allies.
There is no doubt that over the next decade there will be increasing pressure on this country to spend approximately equivalent amounts of money as our competitors in the economic markets of the world, and particular those within the Common Market. The economies of countries which are moving towards monetary union, for instance, cannot possibly withstand very marked discrepancies in the percentages spent on defence.
I therefore concede the importance of my hon. Friend's argument. But to use a simple percentage of GNP as a way of looking at overall defence expenditure is very misleading. SIPRI has come up with a formula for calculating defence expenditure at constant prices. Taking 1960 prices and taking account of 1960 exchange rates and looking at the United Kingdom, the Federal Republic of Germany and France, for example, it reveals some striking facts. For instance the United Kingdom expenditure' between 1950 and 1970, expressed in these constant prices, rose by 1·3 per cent., whereas in the Federal Republic over the same 20-year period it rose by 5·8 per cent. and in France by 42 per cent. So the impression many people in this country have that it is only we who spend money on defence amongst our European allies is false. In the last four years Britain has reduced its defence expenditure, a decision which I support, whereas the Federal Republic has substantially increased it. We need to look at comparable figures and this is where recommendation (3) is important. For instance, if other countries do not put social expenditure into their defence, we must make allowance for that when we compare GNP figures.

Mr. Russell Kerr: My hon. Friend referred to a certain increase in respect of Germany, United Kingdom and French figures. What were the absolute levels for the same years?

Dr. Owen: In 1972, expressed on that same constant price formula, the United Kingdom was spending 4,707 million dollars, Federal Republic 4,643 million dollars and France 4,725 million dollars. I have been trying to examine the trends over the 20-year period. If we consider current prices and current exchange rates for 1970 we find a not dissimilar picture of United Kingdom spending at 5,850 million dollars, the Federal Republic

6,188 million dollars and France 6,014 million dollars. These are SIPRI figures. I often invoke SIPRI for other things and I think that my hon. Friends do the same. SIPRI has shown a more realistic assessment for example of the military balance in Europe. When economic figures are considered, we cannot just dismiss them as inconvenient.
If a country has conscription, it pays its conscripts far less than it pays volunteer forces. That, too, needs to be offset when making comparisons. This was the aim of recommendation (3). We have large forces establishments in Germany and the defence budget therefore carries a higher percentage of the health and education costs that would normally be borne on the internal budget in this country which in other countries are borne on the internal budget.
It is extraordinary that the Ministry of Defence should hide this question, because it must be in its interests that we should debate comparative costs that are true and factual. If the Minister says that these costs are borne on the defence budgets of other countries that will weaken the argument somewhat, but it does not weaken the basic argument that we are bound to pay more because our troops are stationed abroad and are therefore not a charge on the internal economy.
In my view, mutual balanced force reductions are the only hope of making substantial reductions in personnel costs. I draw the attention of the House to the evidence of the Secretary of State on 21st December, 1971, when, speaking of personnel costs, he said:
In the last few years our own figures have gone up from 46 per cent. to about 52 per cent. of the budget…".
Personnel costs are now a very large section of defence costs. If we are to reduce the defence budget, as I know my hon. Friend the Member for Salford, East wishes, we have to face that it is not just equipment costs that will have to be cut. Some part of the cut will have to come from personnel cuts.
My hon. Friend and I may differ about how to get it, but we will not get a substantial reduction in defence costs unless we get mutual balanced force reductions. On page xi of its report the Committee drew attention to the relative strengths of NATO and the Warsaw Pact and said


that this question was of crucial importance. It said:
More detailed information is essential to any judgment of the effectiveness of British defence spending and the financial implications of MBFR",
and the Committee said that it would return to this subject.
In submitting Appendix No. 37 I tried to stimulate debate on comparative force levels. Here I come to a letter that the Minister of State for Defence wrote to me on 23rd March. I am somewhat inhibited because I am not able to reveal the memorandum that the Government made available to the Committee on apparent force levels. However, I have long been championing the view that the Government are less than honest with the country as a whole in what they say about the balance of forces. They consistently refer to a 3:1 divisional ratio or, most commonly in their advertising and in Army recruit posters, the 2:1 ratio on the central front.
I have said that the figure of 2:1 could not be justified on the basis of the figures that the Government have given the Committee, but the Minister's reply was that he did not mean the force levels existing now so much as those levels on M+8, and M+8 would mean nothing to the majority of people reading an Army recruitment advertisement. It does not appear even in small type in advertisements and it now has to be explained that it means either eight days after hostilities have commenced or eight days prior to hostilities commencing, being the decision of the Warsaw Pact countries to mobilise.
That means giving them an eight-day advantage on mobilisation, but it seems to be less than honest with the House of Commons to use the 2:1 ratio. Even on M+8 the total manpower ratio is 1·85:1 Warsaw Pact superiority over NATO. The right hon. Gentleman went on to say that if we struck a balance, for example, between NATO on M-day and the Pact on M+10, only 10 days later, giving the Warsaw Pact countries 10 days, the ratios would go up to a total manpower of 2·07:1.

The Minister of State for Defence (Lord Balniel): I shall not dispute the matter with the hon. Gentleman now, because the Committee will be discussing this

matter at future meetings as has been announced, but I think that he will agree that NATO, as a purely defensive organisation, is geared to defend Western Europe against a potential aggressor and it is not unreasonable that in making one's calculations one should assume that a potential aggressor would have the initiative in mobilisation.

Dr. Owen: I understand the assumption. All I am saying is that if such a fundamental assumption is to be made, its basis should be explained. All I am saying is that the game of figures can be played in any way one likes, but what we badly need are more facts and, if I may say so, more openness by the Government in dealing with the facts.
If over the next year or two we are to have the informed discussion that the country will need, because I am absolutely certain that there will be American troop reductions in Europe and serious pressures on the military budget, we shall need to be able to make decisions on the basis of the facts. If it is reasonable to make these assumptions, the country and the House of Commons should be aware of the basis on which they are being made.
The Warsaw Pact countries could probably equally argue that their pact was a defensive association. There is a danger that we do not sufficiently often put ourselves in the other's position, particularly when considering the sort of discussions which would be the basis of MBFR. One of the advantages of the SALT negotiations was the frankness between the two super-powers about their nuclear arsenals when they began to reveal to each other basic information, most of which was already known to the two super-Powers. This takes us back to the whole subject of secrecy. Most of this information is fully known to the military commanders of the various Warsaw Pact countries and the Soviet Union. We are far too sparing with our information.
I should like to refer again to the old question of nuclear-powered submarines, and the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy will not be surprised if I return to it, because it is a hobbyhorse of mine. However, the only way in which to get change is continually to blast away.


I look with amazement at the way in which this country's naval defence forces are arranged. I draw attention to the evidence of the Flag Officer (Submarines) writing in "Jane's Fighting Ships". He drew attention to the fact that the present building rate of nuclear-powered submarines in the Soviet Union was approximately one submarine every five weeks. The figures given by the Under-Secretary in the same edition of "Jane's Fighting Ships" show that there appears to be a Soviet submarine fleet of some 400 boats of which about one-quarter, or nearly 100, are nuclear-powered while by 1980, although the total number will diminish somewhat, more than half will be nuclear-powered. We are watching a veritable explosion in the impact of nuclear-powered submarines in the Soviet fleet.
What do the Government do? They shift the defence budget of the Navy in favour of surface ships by practically every decision that is taken. They have delayed the previous emphasis on underwater research spending and they have accepted projects such as the Exocet surface-to-surface guided weapon for surface ships, they have kept the "Ark Royal", they have pushed ahead with the cruiser and they have agreed to go ahead with a new helicopter-launched guided missile.
All these are at the expense of putting money into the one urgent necessity, which is a submarine-launched guided weapon missile. More emphasis should be placed on this than on any other single item of military equipment for the Army, the Navy or the Royal Air Force. Evidence given to the Committee makes it perfectly clear that it will not be until 1980 that this country will have a chance of having such an advanced weapon system. It is vitally necessary that this is brought forward by every day possible. We need a conscious decision radically to change the priorities of the Navy.
The Royal Navy is still living in an age at least two decades out of date. This is tragic because we are the only European NATO Power able to build nuclear-powered submarines. All the other European NATO navies can build surface ships, but we are the only European NATO country able to build nuclear-powered submarines. The Dutch Navy has not been allowed to build nuclear-powered submarines, does not have the

know-how and has not been given authorisation by the United States. Ours is the only navy that can decide to build more.

The Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy (Mr. Peter Kirk): I rise on a point of correction, a matter of precision more than anything else. The French have both the capacity and the know-how to build nuclear-powered submarines and are doing so, and they remain a NATO Power even if they are not in the military command.

Dr. Owen: The Government bring France into NATO whenever they want. When I was arguing earlier about mutual balanced force reductions I said what an advantage it would be if the French five divisions were added to the balance of forces in Europe. The Minister of State would not have them included if we were not also adding the Hungarian forces. The Government must make up their mind whether France is or is not in NATO. I should like France to be a complete member, but I hope the Government will not play it one way when it is convenient to them and the other way when it is not. Even France anyhow recognises the importance of building up its nuclear submarine fleet.
I leave the subject there. Any hon. Member who wants to know the powerful, compelling case why nuclear-powered submarines should be built at the expense of the cruiser, of aircraft carriers and of surface ships has only to read in "Jane's Fighting Ships" the article by Vice-Admiral Sir John Roxburgh. The case has also been made out innumerable times before in the House by myself.
I wish to draw attention to another important expenditure implication which has come up through the Committee's work. We are approaching the end of the 1970s with major expenditure on three items of equipment which gives the Government very little room for manœoeuvre in their defence budget. The first is the MRCA, which peaks in 1976, 1977 and 1978, as is brought out in the report. The next is the cruiser, the cost of which, we have already heard, has gone up over £50 million and is going up all the time. It is not possible to build just one. We shall have to build a minimum of three, and again the expenditure is peaking at exactly the same time, at the end of the 1970s.
The third item is the nuclear submarine, and the whole question of the build rate. The Secretary of State for Defence said in evidence to the Committee that we could make the change to building more nuclear-powered submarines, but he was very dubious whether it could be done within the present defence budgets. He totally excluded any possibility of doing anything about updating the nuclear deterrent. He said that it was impossible to do anything about the four Polaris submarines within the present defence budget. Yet in oral answers to Questions last month we heard that the Government are embarked on a review of the implications of the strategic arms limitations agreement, rather implying that they are looking at the whole question of Polaris. It is early to be making a decision on the updating of Polaris, if we have to make that decision. It is not necessary until at least 1975, and it could be argued that the SALT negotiations have postponed that further.
But the House will have to face the fact that this is an important expenditure option. The decision whether or not to take it is up to the House and the Government of the day. But it has important expenditure implications, and the costs would again fall towards the end of the 1970s. Therefore, on expenditure items of equipment alone we shall not have enough room within the present defence budget to pursue all the different policies that the Government are committed to.

Mr. Speaker: Order. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will excuse me for interrupting him, but seven or eight other hon. Members want to take part in the debate and he has already been speaking for over 20 minutes. There must be a little tolerance in these matters, and I hope that he will not go on too long.

Dr. Owen: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to make only two more points. But as there is a marked discrepancy between the number of hon. Members speaking from both sides, think that rather more tolerance should be given to this side.
Ministers should look at the Seawolf project very carefully. The clear evidence to the Committee was that the project

has escalated in cost on every occasion. Though the figures cannot be given to the House, we can say that hon. Members on both sides feel concern about the project, and we are not convinced that it has been examined closely enough. We may well have to put up with the rather more inferior service that we would get from Sea Dart rather than to continue just with Seawolf. No doubt the trouble is that the Services naturally always want the best, but the Government must choose.
I turn finally to the question of the industrial work force, an important part of the defence budget and of our responsibilities in the House. When we questioned the Chief Executive of Dockyards, Mr. Norfolk, the Committee felt that the previous Government had been right to civilianise the dockyards. When we questioned Mr. Rayner, who came in to run the Procurement Executive, the Committee felt that the Government were right to bring in people from outside industry to give an impulse and direction to both those major areas which hitherto was decidedly lacking.
It is extraordinary that there can be a productivity bargain within four naval dockyards when the productivity bonus, as revealed in evidence to the Committee on 25th April, is fixed not by the Defence Department, not by the Navy Department or even the Chief Executive of Dockyards, but by the Civil Service Department. It should be paid for out of savings made within the four dockyards, and not be subject to overall Civil Service control.
I hope that the Minister will consider also abolishing the distinction between industrials and non-industrials, a matter which came up in the Navy dockyards and the Royal Ordnance factories. The Committee, I believe, was convinced that there were now overwhelming arguments to follow up the recommendations of the Prices and Incomes Board in 1967 to have one class throughout the industrial Civil Service and abolish this distinction.
There is a tendency in the House to believe that we can have shortened debates and shortened Questions, and it is time the House realised that a penalty is paid for shortening debate and Questions. The penalty is not to be able to subject the Executive to scrutiny. I do not speak very often, but I should be


prepared to speak a little less often to subject the Executive to greater scrutiny. I am beginning to wonder about the way in which we order debates and Question Time.

Mr. Speaker: Order. When I interrupted the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen), he referred to a disparity between the numbers of hon. Members on either side who wanted to speak. On the time already taken according to my calculations, the Opposition have spoken for 85 minutes in four speeches and the Government side for 54 minutes in four speeches.

6.28 p.m.

Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: The hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun), who has now left the Chamber, asked why we spend so much of our gross national product on defence. The simple answer is that we in Britain must be strong, because if we are weak we invite trouble from the Russians. I think I carry many of my hon. Friends with me when I say that I would rather see a greater defence expenditure than a smaller one.
Our Report was submitted to the Secretary of State five months ago, and we have now had some comments on our recommendations. The Department has made some helpful observations in some respects, but I am less than happy about one or two of them. I shall confine myself to two, turning first to recommendation (3), the allocation of the social services to defence expenditure.
Education alone in Germany costs us about £8 million for the dependants of our Service men. Health and all the other social services are over and above that. The cost of defence in this country is always being subjected to questioning. The public and Parliament take our defence expenditure to be the defence cost ceiling. In fact that is not so. If Service personnel and their families were civilians in the United Kingdom, the expenditure for education and looking after their health would all fall on the local rates or the National Health Service. Therefore, it is not right that this expenditure should be borne on the defence budget. No one is suggesting taking away the functions or the supervision or the provision of these services from the Defence Ministry. What

I am suggesting is that it is right to recharge the appropriate Votes to other Departments so that we can retain in full view our net defence expenditure.
I want to refer now to Question No. 2077 of our Report. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Litchfield and Tamworth (Major General Jack d'Avigdor-Goldsmid) quoted the education bill for Germany alone as £8 million. This was not queried by the Secretary of State. In the next Question I went on to elaborate. The Secretary of State replied:
I feel happier knowing I am responsible for what happens to the dependants of the Services abroad, and I think we do it fairly well.
With great respect to the Secretary of State, I point out that no one is trying to take away anything from him. All we are trying to do in our recommendation is to suggest that the cost of these services should not fall on the defence Vote. The answer we have had so far is an unsatisfactory bromide. It is an answer from one Civil Service Department to another. I hope that today my right hon. Friend the Minister of State will not pick this up and say "It does not really matter", because in absolute terms it does matter if he wants to convince us that we should spend more money on defence and not merely more money on the tail.
If we take the figure of £8 million for education alone and add the costs of the social services in Cyprus and elsewhere, at least another £2 million a year, we reach a total of £10 million. Is the Secretary of State saying that this does not mean very much in terms of his defence budget? Would he not like to see another 10 medium-lift helicopters, which cost about £1 million each? Would he not like another half dozen Harriers, which would come to about £10 million? I suggest that if he would not, the Service chiefs would. This would be an opportunity to secure a genuine increase in the defence Vote without putting any more cost on the Department.
I turn now to the question of the write-off powers. The answer given in the observations of the Department is very helpful. The new Directorate-General of Internal Audit is a step in the right direction. I hope that my right hon. Friend will agree that the subject is, however, too important just to be left there and


that he will suggest to the Directorate-General that there are lessons to be learnt from commerce showing that occasionally one can spend far too much money on checking small amounts whereas if one let them go one would overall save a substantial amount of money. A spot check is far more important than having a fixed rule and saying that everything up to, for example, £100 must be dealt with by a lieutenant-colonel and everything over that amount by a brigadier. It can be a most expensive way of doing it. It is worth asking industry to give some of its best examples to my right hon. Friend, and I hope he will see that the Directorate-General is able to say in 12 or 18 months' time in some sort of report how far it has gone in fulfilling the things we have asked for.
The subject of this debate is one in which all those who serve on the Expenditure Committee have a great interest. Many right hon. and hon. Members would have liked considerably more time to have been allocated to it. It is a pity that we have to have a curtailed debate. I therefore add my voice to that of my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann) in saying that it really is not good enough—this is not addressed to my right hon. Friend the Minister of State but perhaps through him to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House—that the Expenditure Committee, or whichever of its Sub-Committees it might be, is allocated casually a half day here and a half day there, part of which is taken up by the presentation of petitions and the like. We ought to know that we are going to have a fixed allocation and when we are to have it. The Department could then give replies at sensible times and we could then have sensible debates, much more on the lines of a constructive democracy, such as the Americans have on defence matters, instead of being treated as the laughingstock of the democratic world, with it being said "You can debate your report when the Government can find you half a day at the end of the Session, two days before the House rises".
I reinforce what my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton said, that this will not be acceptable to the Expenditure Committee in future. I do not believe that my right hon. and hon. Friends on

the Expenditure Committee feel that they are doing their job properly if they are to be shuffled off like this, and I hope that my right hon. Friend will give us some assurances on the points that have been made.

6.37 p.m.

Lieut. Colonel Colin Mitchell: I am grateful to you, Mr. Speaker, for calling me. Contrary to popular belief, the fastest game in the world is not "pass-the-parcel" in a Belfast pub but keeping within the time limit for a defence debate from the back benches on this side of the House.
I was not a member of the Expenditure Committee. I think that its report is wide-ranging but to me it is somewhat disquieting. Although the Sub-Committee says that its primary rôle—set out in paragraph 18—is to point out the financial implications of existing defence policies and not to comment on the merits of defence strategy, a large part of the evidence it has submitted is indeed comment on the merits of defence strategy. These are political issues which are debated and decided on the Floor of the House of Commons. We have not had enough debate and decision on the strategic issues. I sense, although I may be wrong, that there was a feeling of concern in the Committee that the whole question of Europe's future defence policy was now in the balance.
All the initiatives like the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the mutual and balanced force reduction proposals and detente seem to me to be engendering a situation where American forces in Europe might or might not withdraw by 1980 but certainly will reduce in size. I am sorry to read that the Secretary of State for Defence avoided discussion of political implications when he was examined by the Sub-Committee. At paragraph 2087, in reply to a question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann), the Secretary of State said he hoped that American withdrawal from Europe
will for ever remain a hypothetical question. …
I am sure he believes that not in the least. He may have felt that the problem of American withdrawal, allied to the German demand to be a nuclear Power and Anglo-French nuclear co-operation, in this context is something too difficult


to answer. I feel that in that sense the Committee may not have been doing its job properly when questioning him because it could not have pressed hard enough for these answers.
The need for a European strategic nuclear force for the 1980s is the most vital issue facing defence planners at the moment and the discussion recorded in the Expenditure Committee's Report is to my mind unsatisfactory on that great issue. Anglo-French nuclear co-operation is not inevitably going to be the outcome of our joining the European Economic Community and we all know that France's curious attitude poses very tricky problems. But the fact remains that Europe, which is not a political reality and cannot therefore be a military reality, will be faced with a situation where the strategy of flexible response and forward defence becomes so political in the context of an American withdrawal that there will be a need for ourselves and other NATO countries to increase conventional force levels.
That brings me straight into the report and into the argument and the one point I wish to make. Military manpower thus considered raises the question either of the reintroduction of conscription into this country or an expansion of the all-Regular volunteer Army. The Secretary of State admitted in paragraph 2112 that
in the present circumstances the Army is too small.…
If the Secretary of State for Defence has said, and he said it last year, that in the present circumstances the Army is too small, what are we doing about it? The situation has got much worse since he gave his evidence. We have already seen that Ulster is causing "overstretch". If the needs of the Army come first, as again the Secretary of State said in that paragraph, our figure of 170,000 soldiers by 1973 as planned is not enough. Perhaps we should be aiming at an all-Regular Army of 200,000 by that date. I would be grateful if my right hon. Friend the Minister of State could give us a reply on that when he replies.
We have had discussion on both sides of the House, sensibly balanced, on the question of the proportion of the budget which goes on personnel, which we say now stands at something like 52 per cent. according to paragraph 31 of the report. I am surprised that the Sub-Committee

did not go to the trouble of calling the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence because in a speech he made at the RUSI printed in its latest Journal it will be noted that Professor Bondi said that although it appears that something like 50 per cent. of the budget goes on manpower, if the indirect costs such as housing in Germany, etc., are added, the true figure for manpower is two-thirds of our budget. The Soviets spend only one-third, so our balance for equipment spending is proportionately smaller.
Mention of the Chief Scientific Adviser raises the old point that we must not let our defence discussions go back to politicians, academics and intellectuals. We have very high-powered civil servants paid high salaries. The CSA is employed in the Ministry of Defence. The evidence of such persons is absolutely vital. Just a Lord Zuckerman made such a great contribution to defence matters, so the present CSA has this ability and the Committee was wrong in not using it.
The form of a European nuclear strategic force is something which the Sub-Committee affirmed depended on the Polaris force of four submarines, but I was sorry to see that the French SNLE equivalent force was not mentioned. We are led to believe that it will be ready by 1975 but, like our system, it will provide only one submarine on constant patrol. We all know that by 1980—and the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) spoke with great sense when he mentioned the submarine planning—the systems which these submarine fleets will use will be beginning to be outdated. A new generation of strategic nuclear weapons in ballistic missile submarines will be needed. If these are to be in operation by the 1980s, and I would have thought that they would have to be, surely the agreement to proceed with this has to be taken by 1975, which is only in 18 month's time.
At paragraph 49 the report examines the Polaris nuclear strategic force and asks questions of Admiral Leach. It discusses the possible conversion to Poseidon very fully. I was disappointed that the Committee did not press for views on the acquisition of ULMS—the underwater long-range missile system -which the United States is developing as the successor to Poseidon in the mid-1980s. As is known the great advantage


of that missile is that it keeps the submarines much closer to their own shore, it has longer range and it would tie in completely with the lip service to standarisation which paragraph 31 of the report so amply explans.
In conclusion I would say that the Sub-Committee, even if we are critical, has obviously done valuable work in posing problems for the Government. Defence policy is at a crossroads because of the new European set-up. The American assurance is declining and European co-operation is not yet evident. It is pointless if the Government regard this Report as something which they can carry along until the next defence debate, whenever that may come.
All we know now is that national security in the years ahead depends on boldness and foresight in today's urgent policies. This report as I read it is not a plea for weakness but the basis for more expenditure and stronger forces. I trust that the Government will see to it that we get them.

6.45 p.m.

Mr. Tam Dalyell: Before the hon. and gallant Member for Aberdeenshire, West (Lt.-Col. Colin Mitchell) becomes too eloquent about submarine missiles may I remind him that we have here a time problem. He advocates submarine missiles. This is for the period 1977–84, the period of the through-deck cruiser costing £60 million, the period of Sea Wolf, of MRCA, perhaps of Sea Dart and a good deal more weaponry. I say to him, not in any carping spirit, that after making that kind of speech I expect that in his more reflective moments he will be the first to agree that some fairly hard talking will have to be done to the Treasury.
If anything comes out of the report of the Sub-Committee it is that certain decisions will have to be made very soon about priorities in expenditure, because it is inconceivable that any Government will accept all priorities; it is financially impossible. I should have thought that the best way of using our time was to speak about priorities and perhaps set markers as to what priorities we think ought to be made because they will have to be made very soon.
Before I go any further I should like to refer to the remarks of the right hon. Member for Taunton (Mr. du Cann). This is something that behoves us all. What has happened? There has been a great deal of hard work and sweat. The hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) and his colleagues have worked jolly hard. All of this work has been put in and yet in our candid moments must we not say that much of the evidence was taken over 12 months ago? Much of it by its very nature in this kind of subject becomes stale.
What happens is that the fag end of a Session, as the hon. Member for Hampstead (Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg) said, partly because of pressure which we know was put on the Government's business managers by the right hon. Member for Taunton, the hon. and gallant Member for Eye and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) at last we get the crumb of a debate. This is no way for the House of Commons to set about examining these huge amounts of expenditure. This is not the first time it has happened. The very same thing took place on the massive report of the Select Committee on Science and Technology dealing with the defence research establishments. We were discussing evidence that was 2½ years old by the time it came to the House. This is absolutely absurd because in the military sphere things are very fast-moving, circumstances change, and if there is to be any scrutiny at all we have to have far greater immediacy in our debates.
I look forward to the report of the Expenditure Committee which I believe is to be published tomorrow. I see that the right hon. Member for Taunton confirms that. This is a report which will set out some guidance as to how we conduct our business in this area. I hope that, even if it means that a number of reports are taken late at night, and if there is to be no vote there is no overwhelming objection to this, a time limit will be set of say six weeks or two months after publication of a report for discussion by the House.
In the same breath I would also say that the Department ought also to understand that it should have a time limit for producing its comments on these reports. While a measure of courtesy is acceptable I must say I think that the Department


has produced a comment on the report of the sub-Committee which is an insult to the House. It is lightweight, it has been spatchcocked in a hurry and it is no kind of answer to the hard work done by Members of Parliament. It is all very well for the Minister of State to sit there with a smile on his face, a somewhat watery smile if I may say so—

Lord Balniel: I was not smiling at all.

Mr. Dalyell: I interpreted it as a watery smile. This may be our fault, because if Whitehall thinks that it can get away with it why should it not go on doing this? If we are to be serious about scrutiny we must first of all put our own house in order and secondly do something about the time-scale in which these debates take place.
Having made that remark about Whitehall I must go on to say that anybody who has constituency problems in defence matters must praise the Ministry of Defence for the trouble that it takes with personal cases. I may quarrel with it on procurement matters but on personal cases, when we go to it in connection with the housing problems or service problems of our constituents, we get nothing but the most detailed and humane treatment. I praise the people in the Ministry for the infinite trouble that they take with personal cases. There is a great contrast between the behaviour of the Ministry on procurement matters and its behaviour on personal matters, in respect of which we get the very best treatment.
The first detailed point that I wish to raise concerns the MRCA. The issue of secrecy has been well dealt with by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton. The hon. Member for The High Peak jokingly read out paragraph 41 of the report, leaving in all the blanks. I was not a member of the Committee and I am not privy to secret documents. I am under no kind of obligation that I know of in respect of giving figures, so I will give my rendering of the paragraph in full. In my opinion it should read:
In oral examination, witnesses from MoD were questioned about costs and contingency allowances. The sub-committee were informed that increased costs were a matter of * * * to * * * per cent.
My guess is that it should be 25 per cent. to 30 per cent.

The original contingency allowance was about * * * and it has now been reduced to * * *.
My figures would be 10 per cent. and 5 per cent. I suspect that that would be a pretty unwise guess, but nevertheless I make it.
Unit production cost is estimated at * * * at 1970 prices
I would there insert "£2½1 million"
but if research and development costs are taken into account it rises to * * *.
There, I insert "£4 million".
The heaviest expenditure will come between 1977 and 1984, when it should be between * * * and * * * a year at 1970 prices, or * * * per cent. of the whole defence budget.
That is a misleading statement in itself. What it does not tell us is the number of units ordered. The whole form of the MRCA becomes extremely egregious when one realises that the original estimates were based on 1,000 units at a time when the Italians and the Luftwaffe were going to order and therefore bring down the overheads.

Mr. Speaker: May I point out to the hon. Member that the hon. Member who formerly represented The High Peak is now the hon. Member for Clitheroe (Mr. David Walder).

Mr. Dalyell: I thank you, Mr. Speaker. In a previous incarnation the hon. Member represented The High Peak.
I hope that in the winding-up speech we shall be told something about the basis on which orders are now being made. Anybody who moves around the industry as I do gets a feeling that the Germans will not order even their latest estimate, and the Italians are more or less out of it. The Dutch were in. but they are now out, and we are left with a major British project.
If the Department disagrees with me it can tell me that I am wrong. The general feeling is—and why else would the Germans order American aircraft? —that the MRCA will land here, on us. In those circumstances, any calculation must depend upon the number of units that are likely to be ordered. On the basis of information that has proved trustworthy in the past, I have no doubt that what we are talking about is a unit of £5 million to £6 million. Each MRCA will cost between £5 million and £6 million.
We must reflect a little about that. The hon. Member for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson) knows that serious discussion has taken place on the question whether one unit of MRCA costing between £5 million and £6 million is worth three, four or five Buccaneers. In terms of operational requirements we need some kind of assessment as to the unit efficiency of this highly sophisticated and extremely expensive aircraft Apparently the plans took a long time. We are told that we must look a stage ahead. Before we start looking a stage ahead, however, let us get down to the question whether this extra sophisticated weaponry is worth it, or whether our operational requirements would not be hugely more effective if we stuck to our less sophisticated units.
We were told this afternoon by the Minister for Aerospace, who fortuitously has come into the chamber—he is going out again; he knows what his responsibilities are—that we would have "an integrated European aero-engine industry." [Interruption.] Yes, he did. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Craigton (Mr. Millan)—and we can look it up in HANSARD—he used the phrase "an integrated European aeroengine industry." What he said was admittedly vague. He referred to a more co-ordinated procurement policy for aircraft, and he was then asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Craigton what he meant. In HANSARD tomorrow the words will be found—and we shall look carefully at the context—"an integrated European aero-engine industry." Some of my hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench thought they heard what I heard. We shall read HANSARD tomorrow. If it is to be an integrated European aero-engine industry it will have considerable military consequences.
The bafflement of Ministers is showing. [Interruption.] The Minister of State is looking very baffled.

Lord Balniel: We can clear this matter up when we read HANSARD tomorrow. This is not my departmental responsibility, but I was in the House when this matter was referred to and my impression is that my hon. Friend hoped that we would have an integrated European aero-engine industry, or said that he thought it would be a good thing.

Mr. Dalyell: I am not trying to be pedantic, but I point out that this confirms one of my worst fears, that the so-called Minsterial Aerospace Board which is supposed to combine the military and civil side, does not meet very often and is not a very effective arm of Government.
In the Defence Review published earlier this year great play was made of the Ministerial Aerospace Board. Right or wrong, it is clear that what happens in relation to civil engines is of the greatest consequence to the future development of military aero-engines. I hope to hear a statement about it; in any case I shall certainly write to the Department.
We have been rebuked for taking up time, so I shall make my next two points shortly. The first concerns Sea Wolf. We cannot have Sea Wolf, a through-deck cruiser, the MRCA, and a number of other projects that have been mooted. Some of us took the trouble to go to Stevenage, where we were given a detailed breakdown on Sea Wolf and an outline of the project. A great deal of technical expertise has gone into it. I therefore feel inhibited about reading out any costs, in terms of the wording of paragraph 56, as I did in the case of the MRCA, because that might be breaking a confidence. But I cannot see why we cannot be more candid about these matters.
The hon. and gallant Member for Eye may have given security vetting, but what the hon. Member for Clitheroe (Mr. David Walder) said was quite true: the approximate costs will be no news to the Ruritanians or anyone else. My fear is that the purpose of all the blanks in the report about Seawolf and other projects is nothing to do with security but is to hide precisely what the Ministry of Defence is up to in relation to unit costs. Time and again the Minister of State for Defence Procurement has said to me, in a tone of rebuke, "You know perfectly well that it is never the practice to give unit costs in the House." It is very easy to shelter behind precedent. But precedents can be dangerous. It would be to the good of the Defence Department if it was a little more candid, at no cost to national security, about these matters. If it were, some of the escalations in hardware costs over the last 25 years,


admittedly under both Governments, would not have happened.
Without breaking confidence, and with a fair sense of certainty, I come to the last subject, namely, the through-deck cruiser. On two occasions the Minister of State for Defence Procurement has said that he could not confirm the cost of the cruiser, but it is fairly common knowledge that in the autumn of 1971 the estimated cost was £60 million. Is £60 million for one fairly vulnerable ship a sensible use of resources?
Those of us who have recently been on the "Ark Royal" or who have taken on interest in the Navy—and I am not anti-Service, as the Department knows—understand perfectly well that the vulnerability to a whole range of possible weaponry of a ship like the through-deck cruiser is considerable. It did not take the Israelis long to prove that. How serious are the plans to go ahead with such a £60 million development?
Many hon. Members are concerned about unemployment. I say, in the presence of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kilmarnock (Mr. Ross), that we want some kind of help to be given to the Clyde, but is the notion of building battleships in order to give employment a very sensible philosophy? There are others ways of creating employment on the Clyde. We should build ships if there is an operational requirement for them, but if there is not it is not the best way of creating employment.
I end in the way that my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and others ended —and my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth, West (Mr. Judd) put this case at length. There will be no quibbling from the Front Bench or back benches on this side of the House if the Government say that they will raise considerably the amount of expenditure in the dockyards. I have a tiny constituency interest here and therefore I find it easy to say this, but when the dockyard workers' representatives came to meet us a number of us were appalled at what has happened since June, 1970—and it was in June, 1970, that these workers received their last increase. They are disgracefully paid.
In view of the revelations which have come to light, it behoves all hon. Members who have a genuine interest in the

Services to urge the case for a dramatic review upwards for those who work in the dockyards. As I have indicated, very few of my constituents work at Rosyth. But the justice of the case of these workers is considerable and something must be done about it, if only for the efficiency of the forces.
I have asked about Sea Wolf, about the MRCA and about the through-deck cruiser, but I am concerned, above all, about the style in which the House of Commons considers these complex matters.

7.5 p.m.

Mr. Carol Mather: I hope that the hon. Member for West Lothian (Mr. Dalyell) will forgive me if I do not take up his remarks. I wish to make some observations about our deployment in Northern Ireland, and I make no apology for doing so. Northern Ireland is frequently discussed in the House, but it is central to this report. Also, it is a place where the battle is going on. It is not going on in BAOR or the Far East.
No one who stands at the centre of Londonderry, as I did on Saturday, and sees how it has been absolutely shattered, with many of the buildings completely destroyed, as though there had been a Baedeker raid by the Luftwaffe on the town, will be under any illusion about the kind of enemy we are facing. I believe that every hon. Member should go there during the recess and see the appalling havoc which has been wreaked and then we will all realise what we are up against.
The troops in Northern Ireland are mentioned in paragraph 383 of the Report, together with the question of the extra cost, over and above the present expenditure, involved in deploying troops there. The official who was interviewed made a wild guess that it was £3 million extra a year but this estimate had to be corrected subsequently in Appendix 27 and the corrected figure which was given later was £11·6 million. It is not so much a question of money. The important point is that we cannot sustain 21,000 troops in Northern Ireland indefinitely. Paradoxically, the need for the troops is increasing all the time. Not only do we have to look after the occupation of the no-go areas, but we shall have to give increasing attention to the border.
The IRA is now dispersed and is indulging in tip-and-run raids across the border. I went to Fermanagh on Friday and Saturday, in the extreme south-west, opposite Donegal, the IRA base area. There was a raid on the village of Brooke-borough the night before I arrived which shattered about a dozen houses. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured because a 20-minute warning had been given. A false car location had been given to attract the population to the area where the bomb was about to explode, but luckily everyone got out.
That is the sort of thing which is happening. Farms on the border have been burned down. In the attack on Brooke-borough village four gunmen went across the border, hijacked a car immediately they got into Northern Ireland—

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Ronald Russell): I am sorry to interrupt the hon. Gentleman, but this debate does not cover Northern Ireland, except very briefly.

Mr. Mather: I was giving an example of the sort of situation which had to be faced in Northern Ireland, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and I was going on to suggest ways in which we could economise on the overall expenditure on our troops in Northern Ireland. The question of Northern Ireland is mentioned in the report and I think it is relevant to the debate. I do not want to take up more time—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. This is not primarily a defence debate. It is a debate on the Sub-Committee's report. The hon. Gentleman must not go too far into the question of Northern Ireland.

Mr. Mather: I was simply giving an example, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I wanted to move on to two problems which we face in Northern Ireland. One is the defence of the local population—and the vital point is not a certain bridge or installation but the people living in the area. The second is the control of movement in the border area. Our forces are necessarily very thin on the ground in these areas and the effective number of police and of members of the UDR is less than it was in the days of the USC. Therefore, we need to make up the numbers and to relieve the Regular troops deployed in the Province. I should therefore like to make two propositions. One

is that we arrange for some relief of the Regular troops by providing in Northern Ireland a territorial local defence force, rather on the lines of our Home Guard. This kind of force would be non-sectarian and would also take in men of a rather older age group.
My next point is the question of the Ulster Defence Regiment which was mentioned in the Expenditure Committee's Report.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am afraid that the hon. Member is still out of order. There is only one mention of Northern Ireland in the report and that is in relation to Europe. I must ask the hon. Member not to pursue this.

Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles: Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. In the index, on page 404, there is a very large number of items referring to Northern Ireland, and under which I should have thought Northern Ireland could be discussed. A great many of us, on both sides of the House, I think, but certainly on this side, wished to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Esher (Mr. Mather) on this very important aspect of our military expenditure.

Mr. John Biggs-Davison: May I also draw your attention, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to the fact that the report also refers to control of the Irish border and patrolling on the Irish border?

Mr. Mather: My next point was to raise the question of the Ulster Defence Regiment. This is specifically mentioned in paragraph 395 of the Expenditure Committee's Report. I thank you for allowing me to continue, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I was just saying that I thought we needed some kind of territorial Home Guard defence force and this is an increasing need.
Secondly I would like to make one or two points about the Ulster Defence Regiment, which is particularly mentioned in the report, which proposed an idea, which was then current, that a regular battalion of the UDR should be formed. This, as we learned subsequently, was shelved. What is needed is not a Regular battalion but a Regular company to each existing battalion. I think that this is the universal opinion of the Ulster Defence Regiment units.
I think we might also ask for a relaxation of the existing standing orders. One of these relaxations is that they should be allowed increasingly to take part in urban duties. In fact this happens, because when one goes around one sees the UDR guarding vital points in villages and towns.
There is another rule which could be relaxed, and that is the 1,000-metre rule. There is a standing order that the UDR is not allowed to approach the border closer than 1,000 metres, unless given special permission. I think that in present circumstances this is something which should be looked at and might be replaxed. Also, recruiting policy and positive vetting procedures are very tight at the present time, and I think my right hon. Friend could relaxe those.
I sum up what I have been saying. To reduce the costs, to relieve some of our Regular manpower which is deployed at present in Northern Ireland and to increase the efficiency with which we carry out the task there, I would ask my right hon. Friend to look at the question of some Home Guard territorial type of force in order to cover the area which is close to the border, to observe and report and provide the intelligence which is greatly needed. This type of force could be based either on the UDR as a form of supplementary reserve or it could be based on the police reserve. Secondly I would like my right hon. Friend to look at the relaxation of the standing orders and the possibility of providing Regular companies in the Ulster Defence Regiment. Finally, what is greatly necessary at the present time is insistence on documents for crossing the border and insistence on authorised crossing places. I cannot go into this now but I put this forward as something for my right hon. Friend to consider.
In this campaign in which the defence forces are engaged in Northern Ireland we shall never defeat the guerrillas—I think this is a lesson of history—unless the local people are mobilised. This is what now we have to do, and this would reduce the burden on our Regular forces and might, incidentally, reduce costs.

7.15 p.m.

Mr. Patrick Wall: While I fully support the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher (Mr.

Mather) on Northern Ireland, I hope he will forgive me if I do not continue with that theme.
I should like, as so many people have done, to congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) and his Committee on their report. I was very pleased to see that on the very first page it says that the Committee believes that
an important part of their function is to stimulate public discussion of defence matters.
This seems to me to mean two things—more discussion of defence in the country and, above all, in the House of Commons and less insistence on accuracy.
Normally in the House we have six days on defence, two days for the defence debate itself, one day on each Service, and then a sixth day on all the Service Votes. This year we have had this time cut by one day. I hope that the usual channels will take note, I object very strongly to cutting down the time spent on defence. We have had only a half day on defence today and the usual channels have done their best to cut down the number of Members speaking in the debate. I think this is an insult to the Committee and to the defence committees of both parties.
Defence is a very important matter. It is, after all, the future security of the nation, vast sums of money are expended on it, and it is only right that Parliament should debate these matters, and more frequently than we do at the moment. By comparison, the United States Congress and Senate usually consider and discuss from three to four months the United States defence appropriations, and it thus debates such matters more thoroughly than we do, and now even the comparatively restricted time we had is being cut by the usual channels.

Mr. Biggs-Davison: Will my hon. Friend also take into account that formerly the House was able to have a debate all night on the Service Estimates?

Mr. Wall: I agree, and I hope that this fact will be passed on to the usual channels on both sides of the House.
A recommendation of the Committee was that there should be a review of security classifications, and I did not particularly like the rather typical Civil Service reply given to this suggestion. I


want to stress the fact that the security classification affects not only Members of the Committee but Members of this House as a whole, and we have what I believe to be a ridiculous situation, such as that I myself experienced. Seven years ago I was allowed to go to the Holy Loch by the United States Navy to see over one of their top secret Polaris submarines, but when I more recently, some time ago, requested the Ministry of Defence that I might go to see a naval tactical training teacher at Woolwich I was told I could not because it was programmed for confidential exercises.
This is the height of absurdity. I had just returned from America where with four other Members of the House representing all parties, we visited U.S. military and naval establishments and were shown absolutely everything. We were allowed to see and even photograph equipment ranging from Lance to the Poseidon submarine—so far as I know without any security vetting: we were taken completely on trust, far more than are Members of this House by our own Government. There must be something wrong and I hope that my right hon. Friend will take this matter to heart, because it is one which causes anxiety among hon. Members on both sides of the House.
The Expenditure Committee is a start, and a very good start, but, broadly speaking, it discusses only expenditure, and I believe that what is really needed is a Select Committee on Defence which can discuss policy as well as expenditure. I know that one hon. Member on the other side—I think it was the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen)—said that this Committee could discuss policy, but from a study of the report which the Committee has made it seems to me to have been headed off policy whenever it got on to it. I should like to see a Committee of hon. Members on both sides which could discuss defence as a whole, and could look ahead through the next few years when defence problems will be particularly important not only to this country but Europe and the world. I should prefer to see that type of Committee which could be security cleared if that was necessary.
I want to discuss certain aspects of hardware affecting the three Services, because my contention is that we are now

spending such a large proportion of our defence expenditure on social security, which is very necessary, and on the military salary, which is also important, that not nearly enough is left for the vital issue, which is hardware, the modern weapons required by the three Services.
First, the Army. The Committee, in page xi of the report, talks about flexible response, and says that the doctrine of flexible response means:
renewed reliance on …tactical nuclear weapons.
The Committee has not as yet discussed tactical nuclear weapons, and I hope it will do so in the near future. I merely say again that it is about time BAOR had a modern tactical nuclear weapon. When we were in America we were allowed to examine Lance. I understand that the bugs have now been removed from this weapon system, and it would be a good thing if we got down to purchasing this flexible mobile weapon which is just what is wanted in BAOR as soon as possible. In case people say, "What about expenditure?" surely we can arrange an offset deal with the American Navy, which is buying Harriers. When we were over there Rapier was also being tried out by the Americans. There should be a chance of offset or cross-purchasing in this respect. It is one of the most important factors for the Army in the next few years.
Secondly, in page 37 of the report, there is a reference to the home Army being kept in this country for certain purposes; first, for world-wide reinforcement, particularly in Germany; secondly, for home and overseas service rotation; thirdly, for the ACE mobile force; fourthly for the United Kingdom mobile forces. In this respect, I hope the Committee will discuss the matter referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher when he spoke of urban guerrillas in Northern Ireland. One of the Army's main roles in future may be this form of fighting, and it should be studied in more detail.
My third point concerns helicopters. According to the report, we are ordering 90 Harriers. It is clear from the deliberations of the Committee that those Harriers will not be developed to the full extent of the flexibility that this aircraft allows without helicopter support. There is a


need for the Chinook or Sikorski 53 helicopters for this purpose, for the movement of artillery. We saw an impressive demonstration of this in America, and also for minesweeping. The modern technique of minesweeping is with helicopters, which are much more effective in certain operations. The Sea King is not big enough. Presumably the Chinook or the Sikorski 53, which are more powerful, could thus serve a Navy as well as an Army purpose.
The evidence given on page 247 is that the helicopter:
…"is too slow in flight. It is too lumbering to be an invulnerable or near invulnerable weapon on the battlefield, and I do not regard it as a carrier of weapons or a weapons system".
What we saw in America completely refutes that statement. The Cobra is specially designed as a gunship helicopter. It flies at treetop height and fires a missile with laser guidance giving a direct hit on tanks. Anyone who has seen this will appreciate that this type of helicopter is not as vulnerable as might be expected. I believe them to be an essential constituent of a modern Army.
We have recently been carrying out exercises with helicopters on Salisbury Plain, and I hope we shall not overlook the importance of the gunship helicopter for reconnaissance and operations against armour. I commend to the attention of my right hon. Friend an article in this week's Economist:
…if Britain is not to lag increasingly behind West Germany and France—to say nothing of the United States and Russia—in the military use of helicopters three immediate decisions must be taken. The first is to make sure that inter-service training in this kind of warfare is more frequent than it has been in the past. The second is to resurrect the order for about 30 medium lift helicopters. The third is to make the creation of a helicopter brigade over the next decade a declared aim of British defence policy. If Britain does not, then it will go on playing half-heartedly with a new concept of war—just as it did, with dire results, with armoured warfare in the 1930s.
Moving to the Royal Air Force, the MRCA has come under heavy fire. I will not refer to it except to remind the House that the evidence shows the range of MRCA compared with the Vulcan as one to two. I also understand that the range of MRCA is considerably less than that of the TSR 2. Yet the evidence shows that what we need above all is strike

reconnaissance aircraft of long range. One hopes, if the dire prophecies of the Opposition on costing are not fulfilled, that the MRCA will be effective not only in Europe but in other theatres and that it will have sufficient range to be fully effective. I hope that this will be fully examined before final production orders are placed.
On Air-Navy co-operation, if hon. Members will study page 87 and Question 612, they will find the whole question of the relationship between maritime air and the Royal Navy dealt with. The RN headquarters at Northwood operate maritime reconnaissance but not maritime strike aircraft. I am not happy about this arrangement. The Committee was not happy, but did not go into it in any detail. The question of who will operate Harriers at sea was also raised by the Committee. It was said that it Harriers had to operate from HMS "Ark Royal" they would be operated by the Royal Air Force. In passing, may I say that it is distressing that the aircraft handed over by the Royal Navy to the RAF, namely Phantoms and Buccaneers have had their arrester gear removed so that they cannot operate from carriers. If we decide to operate vertical take-off aircraft from the deck of cruisers such as "Blake" or the new through-deck cruisers, who will operate them? Presumably, as there is no fixed-wing training in the Royal Navy, it is bound to be the RAF. I have a shrewd suspicion that the lessons we learned in the 1920s and the 1930s have now been forgotten.
Finally, I come to the Royal Navy. We are told in the report that there is to be a greater sea concentration on the NATO area. The threat in the NATO area is the 90 nuclear and 300 conventional submarines possessed by the Soviet fleet. We are always fobbed off with NATO and told that we are considering not just Britain but NATO, but NATO is also weak. The main issue is anti-submarine warfare and the protection of seaborne trade. NATO has four anti-submarine carriers and 276 anti-submarine vessels. The Soviet Union has 380 submarines. That is 380 to 280, and the generally accepted ratio of antisubmarine vessels to submarines in the past was two or three to one. The modern nuclear submarine is faster than any escort vessel and this means that our


anti-submarine potential in NATO is far too small to compete with the growing threat from the Soviet Union.
This threat extends to the flanks, Norway and Iceland in the north, and to the Cape in the south. About 57 per cent. of our oil comes round the Cape. When I was in America I was told that 50 per cent. of American oil would be imported round the Cape from the Middle East by the 1980s. Our planners and NATO should look into this in detail. This immense quantity of oil has to be protected in perhaps the most vulnerable area for submarines in the world, namely the South Atlantic and South Indian Ocean.
Referring to vertical take-off aircraft at sea, a number of points have been made about the new through-deck cruisers. Will they be worth the amount we propose to spend on them? The report says they will cost £50 million plus. Originally it was proposed that there should be seven, but now it is proposed that there should be two or three. Is it right to spend this vast sum on ships which may be jacks of all trades and masters of none? They are not called carriers, but they may be used for vertical take-off aircraft. They are not called anti-submarine warships, but they will carry the "Sea King". They are called command cruisers and they are trying to fulfil three or four functions in one hull.
I agree with my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Winchester (Rear-Admiral Morgan-Giles) that we would do much better if we had less sophisticated, cheaper ships—and more of them. When we were in Opposition we used to refer to these vessels that we were advocating as Healey carriers. Perhaps my hon. Friend will look at the arguments which were deployed in those debates since I believe they are still valid today.
On the question of surface ships the evidence which was given to the Committee was that we were keeping about the same number of frigates and destroyers in the next decade, but that they would be more powerful as new ones were built. But ship for ship our frigates and destroyers are less heavily armed with missiles or guns or anti-submarine equipment than are corresponding ships in the American navy, which are mostly nuclear propelled. This certainly applies

to any comparison with the Russian Navy which outgun and outfight any surface ship which our navy possesses. This matter should be looked at in great detail as, as far as I know, British designs have never been publicly justified.
The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton mentioned the balance between surface to submarine ships in the Royal Navy. The ratio in this respect was at one time 4:1, and is not, because of the acceleration of surface ship building, to be 5:1. The submarine is the weapon of the future and the report says it will be the Navy's prime strike weapon. Yet it is still using adaptations of pre-war Mark 8 torpedoes and has not yet been fitted with a submarine-launched surface missile. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that this is the most important single factor facing the Royal Navy today; the missile has been in and out of Defence White Papers year after year.
I should like a clear statement that everything possible is being done to produce this weapon system. It is only with this missile that these ten nuclear fleet submarines which we are to have at the end of the decade will be worth their cost. Let us not forget that as we produce these 10 nuclear submarines we shall be scrapping 26 conventional submarines. These 10 submarines will be all we have other than the Polaris submarines. They must be properly armed.
I came once again to the problem of cost. At present we are told that we are spending 5·5 per cent. of our gross national product on military expenditure. I believe that the right amount for this country to spend to ensure reasonable security is a figure of between 6 and 7 per cent. of GNP. I appreciate the difficulty faced by Governments of both political complexions in having to buy votes with social services, but I feel that we are having far too much butter and not enough guns. We shall reap the whirlwind in due course, as we have already twice in our lifetime but next time we will not get away with it.
I believe that steps should be taken to remove social security costs from the Defence Vote and I agree with the Committee's suggestion on that aspect. There is a danger of married quarters and dental services being regarded as more important than ships and aircraft. If we


can get these costs off the Defence Vote then we shall have more to spend on the hardware that is so essential to the services. Then there is the question of Northern Ireland on which more money has to be spent and also Malta which takes a great deal of expenditure. Both are political matters which should come off the defence vote, it would then mean that a strong case could be made to spend more on hardware. Hardware is always the item that comes in for pruning. We are told that we can depend on NATO but NATO itself is weak in weapons, ships and aircraft.
What are the alternatives? We either spend more on defence or we do more about standardisation—not only standardisation in the NATO nations but in regard to Europe in general. There is a real need for standardisation within Europe. If one country makes tanks, another can make the fighter aircraft and yet another the frigates. Alternatively a common frigate hull could be used by all the NATO navies. Certainly the ultimate answer is to spend more on hardware or achieve this aim by better standardisation.
Governments in the past have not been open enough with the nation about defence expenditure, and this has been the story throughout history. Indeed, one wonders if they are being open today. I believe there is need for a Select Committee on Defence in which these matters could be fully discussed. Only through such a committee will we obtain full value from the £2,000 million and more which we spend each year on defence, and only thus will our survival as a nation be defended—and this, after all, is the Government's primary duty.

7.32 p.m.

Mr. John Tilney: It is most agreeable, Sir Ronald, to address you as Mr. Deputy Speaker, even for a short time. My hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) made a robust and sensible speech, particularly when he dealt with classification. He will see from the evidence given to the Expenditure Committee that we often verged on policy matters. I am sure that this is a factor which will be welcomed by the whole House.
I wish to concentrate on only one matter. My hon. Friend said that we

were in danger of considering married quarters to the extent of their being more important than ships and aircraft. But they are important matters and I hope that the Government will undertake acquisition of such property if it can be found with economy and without the expenditure of more money in the long term.
Wherever the Committee went in Germany we discovered that the main effect on morale lay in the difficulty of finding married quarters. One Royal Air Force driver told me that he had spent many months looking for accommodation for his wife since he had been unable to obtain married quarters. I remember a cook in one of the Guards battalions telling me that his wife had been incarcerated in a small flat in a German village many miles from Munster, from which there was a bus service only twice a day and there was no other English person nearby. He was paying very high rent for those premises. I also remember an NCO at Munster who counted himself lucky that he no longer had to commute 50 miles daily to see his wife and family because he had found a place for them eight miles away. Surely something could be done about these situations.
We must bear in mind four factors. The first is that the same argument should apply to the acquisition of property for the Army in Europe as it does to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in purchasing property overseas. Select Committees have made many recommendations on this topic to the Foreign Office in the past.
Secondly, we must all accept that in recent years money has been difficult to find because of our balance of payments problems. We can at least hope that from now on the situation will improve.
Thirdly, we are now to be involved in Europe more than was ever thought likely and we hope that our forces will be in Europe for many decades to come. Even if we buy properties overseas for Service use and our forces do not remain abroad, that property will always be saleable, no doubt at a good profit.
Fourthly, if it is regarded as sound policy for an individual, a company or a bank to have assets in property, it is surely sensible that the same policy


should apply to us as a nation. Why should our reserves be held only in gold and in depreciating dollars? It would be much better to have property in the form of married quarters overseas which we own rather than rent. In the long run this would repay our nation handsomely.
I am not suggesting that those married quarters should be put in the wilds, in places where there are airfields many miles away from big cities. In these days, when most people have cars, married quarters should be built on the peripheries of expanding towns. If they are built as tower blocks we must bear in mind that we do not want to create national ghettoes. Depending where they are, I sugeest that local Germans, Dutch or Belgians should be able to use those blocks. The benefit of blocks is that it is possible to create places for children to play and car parks underneath them. There can also be clubs for the wives. The alternative to blocks of course is to buy land and build terraced houses with car parks nearby.
I am not convinced by the argument from the Ministry of Defence that it is difficult to renegotiate the NATO agreement, that it is better to rely on the German Government and for them to rely on a German contractor to build what we want. It does not make sense to me to do that and, having paid rent for a great many years, to have no saleable asset at the end. Therefore I commend the Committee's sixth recommendation about renegotiating the relevant NATO agreement. I understand that it is still being looked at by the Ministry of Defence. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Minister of State for Defence will be able to give us some good news about it.
Any renegotiation should apply not only to Germany but to Belgium and to Holland. At present quite a number of wives are living in Holland when their husbands are in Germany. It is a matter between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence, but I stress that it is a unanimous recommendation of the Committee.

7.42 p.m.

Dame Joan Vickers: I am glad to have this opportunity to pay tribute to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H.

Harrison). The House will remember that he was a prisoner-of-war in the Far East; he and his fellow prisoners showed magnificent courage in carrying on during that terrible time. My hon. and gallant Friend knows only too well how short of equipment we were at that time and, if for no other reason, he is the right person to be the chairman of such a Committee and he is to be congratulated on his report.
I am sorry to see that the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) is not in his place at the moment. I hope his enthusiasm for nuclear submarines continues and that he will be able to convince the citizens of Plymouth about his views in the near future.
I begin my remarks by quoting some words of President Nixon:
There is an irreducible minimum of essential military security, for if we are less strong than necessary, there will be no domestic society to look after.
I am sorry that the hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) is not here at the moment, because I believe that that is the way we should approach the problem today.
Not having been a member of the Committee, I was disappointed by the Minister's scant observations on the report. This is a document of 398 pages. It was disappointing to read his meagre observations. I hope he will be a little more forthcoming today about the Government's thinking.
I agreed with very many of the points made by the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden). I have read many documents for which he has been responsible at the WEU Assembly, and he always puts forward factual and powerful points.
It is difficult to get from the report a real understanding of what is being spent on "hardware". We know that 52 per cent. is spent on personnel and welfare. However, this should be completely separate expenditure, as should the expenditure on industrial and non-industrial civil servants. Here I agree with the hon. Member for Sutton. These should be in one category; there should be no difference between the two. I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Geoffrey Fins-berg) who said that this expenditure


should be met out of the estimates of other Ministries. In my view it is essential that it should be a separate category in terms of Ministry of Defence expenditure but that the Ministry must keep education and welfare under its own control. If it does not, inevitably there will be meddling, disagreement and delays between different Departments. If the Ministry of Defence wants to spend so much on education it may not be agreed with that Department but it can be offset within its own Ministry. It is a dangerous idea to separate the two. Having served overseas, I have some idea of the complications that can arise—

Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: I do not want my hon. Friend to misquote or to misunderstand me. I said that the Ministry of Defence should retain full control over the Services but that the bill should be met by the other Departments.

Dame Joan Vickers: But it is impossible to have full control and not pay the bill; this is the difficulty. As one who served overseas and had to obtain money through the Colonial Office, I know that one estimated expenditure only to find, if it came to more, that it was not paid; it was taken out of next year's estimate. In this instance the funds must come out of the Service Vote.
I was amazed by some of the vague replies given by witnesses, so much so that I began to wonder how true the report was. One example concerned the French carriers. It was stated that there were three. However, even I knew that there are only two, and this mistake had to be corrected by means of a footnote. There are several similar examples.
I found it extremely irritating to read incomplete remarks in the minutes of evidence. To give just one example, I read:
I gathered when I saw it that you only have one pilot per Harrier. Is that not correct?—No, that is not correct …The planned ratio at the moment is — pilots per aircraft.
This type of answer looks quite ridiculous.
The SSAFA nursing sisters do extraordinarily good work. I am very glad to know that an additional 12 have been authorised. However, I should like to know their terms of reference, for how long they will be engaged and whether

they can return to their local authorities with their pensions guaranteed.
Then there is the proposal for an English language television service. Now that we are joining the Common Market it will be interesting to know what encouragement is being given to the Services to learn German. After all, a very good way to learn German is to follow it on television programmes.
I am sorry that my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Mr. Tilney) has left the Chamber, because it was he who referred to the Committee's sixth recommendation concerning land for married quarters on the outskirts of German towns. I was pleased to read in the report that these quarters should not necessarily be for the exclusive use of British personnel. It would be a great pity if British Forces in Germany or anywhere else lived in cantonments, as was the unfortunate practice in India. if we are going into the Common Market, the Services should mix with the people of the countries concerned. We were careful to do this in many places in Malaysia and it worked very well.
My main reason for intervening in the debate concerns standardisation. It may be remembered that recently I asked a Parliamentary Question about it, following what I said that it was my intention to raise the matter on the Adjournment. However, it is more convenient to do it in the course of this debate.
It is said about rising costs that one apparent solution is more standardisation of equipment between NATO allies. There is a proposal, for example, to send commandos to Norway, and there will be three different sections comprising the Royal Marines and Dutch and American commandos, so it is a great pity that their equipment is not standardised. At the last meeting of the WEU Assembly in Paris, my right hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr. Sandys) asked the Italian Minister who was replying for the Council of Ministers about the possibility of setting up a small committee to deal with this problem. My right hon. Friend was told that it could not be done, on the grounds of expense. It is essential to have such a committee and I hope that on pressing for this we shall have a European committee dealing with standardisation within the NATO countries.
The Sub-Committee appears to have been concerned about this
vital absence of progress in this direction".
When questioned, the Secretary of State admitted that
one of the most disappointing aspects of NATO since 1949 has been the lack of any real advance in the standardisation of weapons.
I raised this matter at the last WEU meeting in Paris with my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy when we discussed a report submitted on behalf of the Committee on Defence Questions by Mr. Vedovato, the Italian rapporteur, regarding the imbalance of naval ships. At present Britain has the biggest building programme for naval ships of recent years. Is there any co-ordination in regard to building ships with other European countries? For example, do we have too many destroyers and not enough helicopters or commando carriers? Ships take a long time to build, so it is essential to have a co-ordinated programme.
I want to refer briefly to the question of the cruisers, which is mentioned in paragraph 51, and to HMS "Ark Royal". We were told that it was too expensive to repair HMS "Eagle" or to bring her up to date. We were told later that HMS "Ark Royal" will operate primarily in NATO waters but that could operate worldwide if required, and I want to know for how long. It appears that we shall not get any cruisers for another six years. How many repairs will HMS "Ark Royal" need in this time, because then she will not be able to go worldwide? If the cruisers really are to cost £50 million each we would have done much better to have kept the two carriers longer, at least until a cruiser is available.
The WEU committee also recommended that a standing naval force be constituted to operate throughout the Mediterranean with vessels from all the Mediterranean NATO countries, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. How much has been done in regard to standardisation in the Navy?
Paragraph 31 of the report contains this statement:
Some countries can afford more sophisticated weapons than others. Different countries

have different requirements and tactical assumptions.
Surely the tactical assumptions in Europe must be the same. This is the whole point of having the NATO force and of being allies. Why cannot standardisation be applied at any rate to NATO?
Paragraph 31 says later:
and we hope that HMG will press vigorously for standardisation of equipment",
with this sensible rider:
where possible safeguarding the industrial potential of individual countries by spreading production over several countries.
I gather that this is one of the things considered in the report.
I am Chairman of the Committee on Relations with National Parliaments. We discuss in the different countries any resolutions that go forward. Therefore, I am able to know that other countries discuss their defence problems in special committees far more than we do.
Following this report from the Expenditure Committee I still consider—I gather that my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) agrees with me—it necessary to have an all-party defence committee where we can discuss policy. The Expenditure Committee is a step in the right direction, but there was an all-party Motion on the Order Paper calling for an all-party defence committee. More and more European countries are setting up such committees. Were we to set up such a committee we could have joint committees with all-party defence committees of the other EEC nations.
Paragraph 9 of the report contains these words:
Care must be taken, in particular, in reaching decisions, that the application of a defence viewpoint' does not lead to deals being made between the Services to support each other's projects, irrespective of overall defence and economic considerations. We consider that this is a serious danger.
Surely the Services should co-operate and not hid against each other. I should have thought that this is important.
Paragraph 57 of the report is a most extraordinary paragraph which deals with Seawolf. I will not read the whole paragraph, mostly because it is full of blanks. It is astonishing that the paragraph finishes with five stars, whether from


exasperation or from habit I am unable to say. The paragraph contains these words:
The second factor is the failure to secure the collaboration of one or more of our Allies in this project"—
this is the Seawolf—
not just to keep down costs, but to achieve a greater measure of standardisation. At present there is very little standardisation of weapons within the NATO navies"—
this is the case with other weapons, too—
and, as far as Seawolf is concerned, nothing has been done to secure co-operation with other countries since the failure of the original attempts in 1964–65.
This is very unfortunate and I hope that if nothing else comes from this debate we shall at any rate all be agreed on the need to press for standardisation of weapons.

7.56 p.m.

Mr. John Wilkinson: I apologise for joining the debate so late. I understand that there is a punter's charter or something like that on the Order Paper after this.
This is an important debate. The supreme function of Parliament has always been to scrutinise public expenditure, and above all military expenditure, because this is at the very heart of our raison d'etre as a democratic Parliament.
That said, I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) and his colleagues on the thoroughness of the report. I shall try to be brief and just outline a few aspects of it. The first is, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, West (Lt.-Col. Colin Mitchell) said, that the whole report has been compiled in a strategic vacuum. I understand clearly that the purpose of the Sub-Committee is to scrutinise expenditure. None the less, there are some very large strategic decisions which go a-begging, particularly in the field of European defence.
Here I echo my hon. and gallant Friend's words, though my approach might be slightly different from his. When I see, for example, that the single largest item on the defence Estimates is the British Army of the Rhine, almost twice as big as any other item, I am led to question it. I am led to question it particularly because what my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Geoffrey

Finsberg) said about the escalating rate of social service expenditure on the defence budget is perfectly true, especially in Germany. I am also led to question it because I believe that the most logical contribution that the United Kingdom can make to European defence in the 1970s and 1980s is in mobile sea and air power on the rear and the flanks of the NATO Alliance. I am convinced of this.
I do not believe that it makes sense to tie up an ever-increasing proportion of our military manpower and our military budget as a hostage to fortune on the plains of Central Europe. I believe that in the air age it is possible to reinforce rapidly from the United Kingdom. I believe that the United Kingdom possesses a great deal of expertise, particularly in the United Kingdom mobile force in terms of parachute regiments, commandos, amphibious forces and the like. This should be developed rather than tying up so much of our expenditure in a fixed presence in Germany.
Furthermore, we must analyse what we have in Germany. The most important aspect of the Committee's report here is its reference to the use of the helicopter. My hon. and gallant Friend rightly drew attention to the trials that are going on at this very moment on the use of the helicopter in the land battle. I believe, as the Committee hinted, that the helicopter is not only the gunship and the supreme anti-tank weapon of the future. It is also the future equivalent of the jeep. We must plan accordingly and I welcome the reference to this in the Sub-Committee's report.
It is also of paramount importance to have a heavy lift capability if dispersed air power forward in the field is to retain a degree of invulnerability against firs' strike. There is no alternative for this. In the seventies and eighties our air power in Europe must be capable of dispersal and that is why, although it is right to spend more money on airfield camouflage and hardening, the whole emphasis should be on dispersal and the ability to use short strips and fields to the best advantage of our Air Force.
That leads me to the MRCA which is again central to the problem of European air power in the later seventies and in the eighties. The hon. Member for West Lothian (Mr. Dalyell) had some telling


things to say about this project. The fact is that unless we are very lucky this is the last opportunity we shall have to debate this programme before the critical review stage in November.
Without the Multi-role combat aircraft the Royal Air Force will have no effective front line aircraft in the late seventies and early eighties. This is the magnitude of the decision that will come in November. Without the MRCA the British military aircraft industry and with it European collaboration in military projects are put in jeopardy, so it is of crucial significance. And with the MRCA go a whole host of other potential swing wing projects like the "Panap", Panavia New Aircraft Project, to which we look in the years ahead.
I have always believed training to be of supreme importance for a professional force. My own interest is in the training of air forces. It is interesting that at Question 668 in the report it is alleged to be nearly always impossible to separate costing for operational conversion units. This may not seem important to some of my hon. Friends, but in choosing the 1182 as the advanced trainer for the Royal Air Force the fact is that this was done in the knowledge that much of the advanced training which the Jaguar would have done would have to be shifted to the operational conversion stage. I suggest that this decision could not have been taken in the total financial context if one cannot analyse properly the cost of operational conversion training.
Then I come to the carriers and Harriers. This hobby-horse has been well ridden today. If the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. Owen) had any main point in his speech, the central one which we should remember is that although many of the points may be hobby-horses they cannot be repeated often enough, and on the Harrier and the through-deck cruisers it is essential for the future of the Royal Navy that it has integral air power for the late seventies and eighties. It cannot be stated more simply than that and, in the context of the procurement process that is now in hand, there is no alternative to the

Harrier whether one likes it or not, and no effective alternative to the through-deck cruisers when the "Ark Royal" comes out of service.
On the reserves, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Aberdeenshire, West postulated many interesting things about manpower. I made my maiden speech just over two years ago on this very subject and the ever-escalating costs of manpower on a fixed defence budget. For the years ahead to the quinquennium 1975–76 it rises by only 0·6 per cent., so we are working to fixed budgets. But weapon costs are escalating fast. They now comprise only one-third of the total of the British defence budget and unless we are careful—this was brought out by the Secretary of State himself—we shall get to the ludicrous situation of the Canadians who spend only 13 per cent. of their budget on equipment. They, apart from ourselves, are the only country in the Western Alliance which relies on an all-volunteer pattern of Regular engagement. There is something of significance there.
Some would turn to conscription whilst others, like myself, would augment the reserve forces. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Lichfield and Tamworth (Major General Jack d'Avigdor-Goldsmid), who is such an expert in this field, developed that argument on the Army side in the Sub-Committee's report, and on the naval side it was made quite clear that as we had no ships in the reserve fleet there was little point in maintaining a substantial naval reserve in training.
As for the Royal Air Force, the same thing was said by Air Vice-Marshal de Lacey Le Cheminant. He said at question 1037:
You do not need more pilots because you have not got the reserve aircraft in which to employ these pilots.
The whole hypothesis of the report is that the sort of war that we would fight would last for only a few days and, therefore, there would be no need for expansion and no need to augment the front line or to replace casualties.
The thinking on this subject was quite terrifying. Reference was made in Question 1021 to the fact that there are only 100 officers in the RAF Volunteer


Reserve. It was said that they are non-flying personnel, following which there was a series of Questions:
What are they paid? Are they paid the same as in the Army?—I am not sure whether these people are actually paid. They are specialists who, I imagine, would if called out be able to do the job without any particular training.
Earlier the question had been asked:
How do you keep in touch with them in case of call-out, and when they get over a certain age do they come off the list?—I have not got any specific information on this. Perhaps we could send you a note on the subject.
Question 1028 asked:
I think the Army argument was that the best way of keeping in touch with people was a bit of pay?—Probably the best thing would be to let you have a note giving some hard information about this".
We then come to the various categories of reserve. The chairman said that the biggest one was Class E and that there were 7,000, of whom 1,200 had no specific training. He asked
what happens to the other 5,000?—The other 5,000 just remain on the reserve list and stay on it until their three years are up. They have a certain liability for recall during that period. That is all there is to it.
Do you know when they move house?—I assume they must have a requirement to notify changes of address.
It gets even more horrifying at paragraph 1043:
One can gather from what you say that there is scope for simplification of the reserve structure?—This may well be so.
And has this been looked at?—I do not know, I am afraid.
And so it goes on. There is a quite terrifying catalogue of complacency about the reserve potential of one of Her Majesty's fighting Services.
In conclusion, I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend and my hon. Friends who have prepared a detailed, informative and thought-provoking report. I conclude with one last apologia on the question of security and the MRCA. We have the blankety-blanks which have been referred to often enough during the debate. We are told that costs are not so important from a security point of view as the capability of a weapons system. If one is interested in the capability of the MRCA one finds in Question 1861 something to do with its short field performance and the fact that it can

use a runway of between 1,000 and 1,500 feet for take-off.
If one wants to find out about the armament of the aeroplane, a question about the guns receives the normal blankety-blank reply. But if one then looks at the back of the same section on the MRCA at question 1928, one finds that a colleague has put down a question about the type of guns, so one can assume that the guns are standard fitting. If one studies the document carefully, as I am sure is done on the other side of the Iron Curtain, one can gain quite a lot of information from it.

8.9 p.m.

Dr. Alan Glyn: I congratulate my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) on producing this document, but I share the view expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice (Mr. Wall) that we have been given insufficient time to debate this subject and we are debating it two days before the Recess, which I do not think is the best time to debate a document of this complexity and importance.
I want to emphasise the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Mr. Tilney) of the importance of looking very much further ahead with regard to married quarters. These hirings, which one sees not only here but abroad, should as far as humanly possible be phased out. We should purchase the properties so that we do not have a continuous liability.
In a garrison town, such as Windsor, one also needs to help people who leave the forces to purchase property or settle in some sort of accommodation. This is a very difficult problem, and one to which I have referred on many occasions in this House. If we are to recruit men it is vitally important that they should know that when they leave the Services such help will be available to them. I know that there are already schemes of this nature, but I ask my right hon. Friend to consider the subject with even greater emphasis.
I know that in the aftermath of our defeat in 1964 there was a tendency to reduce the reserve forces and that makes it more difficult to re-form volunteer reserves, but if we are to succeed in raising them it is essential to make sure that they


are properly equipped and given a rôle and opportunity of service abroad in which they can serve, as I have always said, as units and not as individuals. It is essential, if we are to have reserve forces, to give those men encouragement.
With reference to paragraph 31, I am sure that everyone who served abroad in the last war or any other war realises how vital is the standardisation of equipment. How can we have an army comprised of many nations each of which uses different equipment, and even different calibres of weapons? Not only from the economy point of view but if and when we get down to actual fighting or allied exercises it is essential that we have inter-changeability of equipment. I go further and say that it is very important to get together with our allies and decide which of us shall produce which form of equipment. One country may be able to produce certain equipment more cheaply than another, and this pooling of resources is essential in the modern army.
My hon. Friend the Member of Esher (Mr. Mather) was nearly ruled out of order for referring to Northern Ireland but I agree with him. In my view it is still physically possible to seal the Border and have exit and entry points. I saw this done in Algeria, and I know that it is physically possible.
We are going into Europe and it is essential that our partners in Europe should share the burden of defence with us. If we are to give them the advantages of the Polaris submarine deterrent, it is their duty, and ours, to get together not only to standardise equipment but to share the defence burden.
Finally, the one question we have to ask ourselves is whether we are voting enough of our GNP to make sure that the country is properly defended in future.

8.13 p.m.

The Minister of State for Defence (Lord Balniel): A number of hon. Members have very understandably referred to the fact that this debate has to some extent been curtailed but there will be very general agreement that although curtailed it has been an extremely helpful debate; helpful not only to the

Ministers concerned with defence, but also to the Defence and External Affairs Sub-Committee in its future deliberations.
I must begin by congratulating the Chairman of the Sub-Committee, my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) and the members of the Committee on the extremely thorough way in which they have undertaken their responsibilities. No one appreciates better than the House the heavy burden of work that falls on back benchers and for them to have undertaken this additional task is a very remarkable feat. Witnesses who have been before the Committee were filled with admiration for the way in which its affairs were handled.

Mr. Dalyell: If that is so, why does the Minister of State permit his Department to give the hon. and gallant Member for Eye (Sir H. Harrison) and other members of the Committee such a really slighting comment?

Lord Balniel: Had the hon. Member permitted me to proceed a little further I would have commented on that very point, although I reject at once the hypothesis on which he based his remarks there having been no slight at all.
It is almost impossible to speak on all the various subjects that have been mentioned. We have had the welfare aspects of the Services, the nuclear deterrent, conscription, the balance of Warsaw Pact and NATO countries, reference to Northern Ireland and the mutual balanced force reductions. We have even had reference to the next Labour Party manifesto. This has probably been one of the widest defence debates I have attended for a very long time. But as the Report itself covers such a variety of subjects it is only right that I should refer mainly to its recommendations and various aspects.

Mr. Wall: I understand what my right hon. Friend says, but if he cannot refer to them this evening will he undertake to write to hon. Members on some points that some of us have raised on a number of other occasions and have not had answered?

Lord Balniel: I will certainly study all the points that have been made in the debate and if there are some on which


it seems that I can help hon. Members by writing to them I most certainly will do so.
One of the very real strengths of the new Expenditure Committee set up last year has been the very broad terms of reference under which it and the Defence and External Affairs Sub-Committee have been operating. Many hon. Members will have found this of great value in fulfilling their task. But these broad terms of reference have added to the difficulties which a Department has to meet in preparing its comments on the recommendations of the Committee. It has meant, for instance, a considerable amount of interdepartmental discussion, and in several instances the recommendations of the Sub-Committee have required the obtaining of inter-departmental agreement before I could comment to the House on the recommendations, and before our observations could be finalised.
I was most anxious to assist the House by having our observations available before the debate took place, and we therefore took the steps of issuing our observations as a memorandum to the Select Committee itself rather than to follow what would have been the more normal practice of issuing them as a Command Paper. I have read the note which the Expenditure Committee has appended to the memorandum, and obviously no discourtesy at all was intended to the House.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead (Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg) and the hon. Member for West Lothian (Mr. Dalyell) referred to the timing of the debate. We had planned to publish our observations before the Summer Recess but parliamentary time unexpectedly became available which raised the possibility of a debate before the departmental observations were printed. The Committee chose to debate this subject knowing that our observations were not available. This clearly would not have been satisfactory from the point of view of the House, and we therefore made available a typescript of our observations at short notice. This was done simply in order to assist the House, though the comments of the Committee were, frankly, a fraction harsh when directed towards the Ministry of Defence.

Mr. Hattersley: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I

did not labour the point about the time it had taken for his Department to complete its comments. But I find it difficult to sit and listen to him telling the House what a favour has been done by these comments being prepared before the end of the Session. Does the Minister not recall that the period between publication of the report and the publication of the comments was five months? He recalls, does he not, that debate on the subject was scheduled for a fortnight ago and that we had nothing by way of comments until I raised the matter on the Floor of the House with the Leader of the House?

Lord Balniel: Surely the hon. Member will recollect that we are well within the time which is allowed to the Civil Service for preparing their comments and he will know that the normal time for these debates is after the Recess in the autumn. My main point is that no discourtesy was intended. We have done our utmost to try to assist the Committee and I hope that the House will accept that.
The Defence Department has responsibility over a wide range of activities. In some respects it is operating with fairly normal administrative procedures. In others it is trying to forestall and counter the possibility of aggression by any potentially hostile country which itself will be using the most advanced and the most secret technologies which are available. It is spending at present about £2,800 million a year. It is therefore not at all surprising that a group of experienced MPs examining such a Department should find areas where—in their view—the machinery and control methods were not as they would wish. On the other hand, it is equally not surprising that in some of these instances a Department, drawing on its experience over the years, should reject some of the recommendations of the Sub-Committee.
The House will know that we have accepted most of the recommendations—but where we have rejected a recommendation it has in no sense been an indication of complacency on the part of the Department. In no case has a recommendation of the Sub-Committee been dismissed without the closest study and where we have not been able to go along


with the views expressed by the Sub-Committee it is because we have had very real doubts about the wisdom of adopting their recommendations.
My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dame Joan Vickers) said that she was rather disappointed by our reaction to the recommendations. In fact we have willingly accepted most of the recommendations made in the Second Report. Two of these recommendations—indeed, the first two which are much the most basic—will I think prove to be of the greatest importance for the future work of the Sub-Committee and gradually over the years I believe should contribute to an improved quality of debate of defence matters in this House, and, equally important, improve the quality of discussion on defence matters outside the House.
The first of these recommendations relates to the security classification of material submitted to the Sub-Committee —and the second relates to the financial data made available. During the course of the last Session the Government agreed to submit classified information up to and including the level of "secret" subject, of course, to certain conditions. Indeed, the Sub-Committee have received more classified information on defence matters than any Committee of the House until now. The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) discussed the issue of secrecy both in his speech and at some length in an exceedingly interesting article in the New Scientist quite recently, where he commented
No Parliamentary Committee has hitherto ever been given consistent access to such highly classified documents as of right.
Since the Report has been published the Permanent Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Defence Sir James Dunnett has explained to the Sub-Committee the difficulties which could arise if we were to extend the present practice very much further.
I accept that the American practice in releasing for publication information to Congress is more generous than ours but I believe that our reasons for not going further are soundly based. It is not that we are frightened of public discussion in the House or of public discussion in the

news media. It is certainly not as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye said, as a cloak for inefficiency. It is rather that with a much smaller scale of defence expenditure and defence equipment we would be in real commercial difficulties and—in certain areas on straightforward military security grounds —if we adopted the American procedure in full. It is also a fact that the House Committees in Washington play a wider part in authorising expenditure than Select Committees do in London and to this extent they fulfil a function which is far closer to the Executive than are hon. Members in this country. Many hon. Members who have studied the House Committees in Washington, as I did at one time, would certainly have doubts as to whether it would be in the real interests of Parliament and of the Opposition if we were to proceed too far along the lines towards the American system. A society must have a kind of balance between privacy for the individual and security for the executive and publicity. Obviously a Government has to be careful on security matters—equally obviously the public has an interest in public examination and as individuals an interest in privacy.
We have extended to the Committee access to highly classified documents—but the Committee feel that some difficulties still remain. To some extent these difficulties are inherent in the very subject of defence, they are considering. But we want to help—and the Permanent Under-Secretary made an offer on 9th May which I hope will go a long way to meeting such difficulties as now remain. He undertook to deal personally with any proposals from the Committee to include in its report information which might be unsuitable for publication for security, or commercial or international reasons so as to ensure that exclusions are justified and necessary. From my reading of the minutes of that meeting I got the impression that our suggestions for helping at the report stage were generally welcomed by the Committee.
The second recommendation, and also one of the more fundamental claims made by the Sub-Committee is that
All figures should be made available to the Sub-Committee on request.
Obviously financial details are of great importance to any expenditure committee. Indeed, a mass of financial information


has been made available. The Ministry of Defence have submitted more than 40 main memoranda and innumerable supplementary notes. Some of these are published in the Report but there have been many others which are not known to the public but which, taken together, have provided a significant and helpful amount of information for the work of the Sub-Committee. There is just one specific instance where figures have been refused in the past. The Sub-Committee have fairly pointed out that the Public Expenditure White Paper gives global figures for the Defence Budget for four years ahead but when they asked for a functional analysis of these figures for the four years they were given the figures only for the first two years. I have reconsidered this decision in the light of the Committee's recommendations and in future for any year for which the public expenditure White Paper gives a firm defence budget total the corresponding functional analysis will be provided for the Sub-Committee under the 57 headings for which data are already provided.
We cannot, however, provide all figures on request as was the full recommendation of the Sub-Committee. On this basis figures would be given long before there had been any need even for Ministers to consider them and therefore long before anything like a firm base in Government policy had been established. I am sorry that I cannot go all the way to meet this recommendation, but what we propose is a major step forward in the future work of the Sub-Committee.
The hon. Member for Birmingham, Sparkbrook (Mr. Hattersley) asked whether the costs of long-term projects could be given, and he mentioned particularly the MRCA, the cruiser and Sea-wolf. When the Sub-Committee is investigating a particular project, we shall try to be as helpful as we can in giving it the information it needs, but there must be some limits to how far we can go. For example, we could not give figures before Ministers had taken the necessary decisions to go ahead with a project. We cannot make figures available before Ministers have decided at the various check and control points in a project.
We must also—and I think that he will appreciate this—be careful not to undermine our negotiating position with the

firms concerned and we must be careful in collaborative projects to have the agreement of our partners in disclosing information—not all Governments are as forthcoming with information as we are prepared to be in this kind of matter.
The hon. Member for West Lothian asked for a progress report about MRCA. It remains the cornerstone of the planned RAF strike, reconnaissance and air defence force from the late-1970s through the 1980s. The review last summer confirmed that progress was satisfactory in relation to the time scale, performance and costs. Since then progress with the development programme has continued to be satisfactory. The next review is planned for towards the end of this year when we shall need to start thinking about initial production commitments, and the aircraft is expected to be in service in the second half of the 1970s.

Mr. Dalyell: Has the Minister anything to say about when it is likely to be ordered not only by ourselves, but by our allies?

Lord Balniel: I am not in a position at this moment to say anything about that, but, clearly, there will be another control point at the end of this year and a matter of this kind could be raised at that stage.
My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and others referred to the recommendation of the Sub-Committee that we should consider removing expenditure on health, married accommodation and especially education from the Defence Budget. We have examined this suggestion closely and we see the force of the reasoning behind the recommendation. But our definition of the defence budget is not seriously out of line with that adopted by many other countries, a subject mentioned by the hon. Member for Sutton. Indeed, the NATO definition includes rather more of this kind of social service than we have in our defence budget. Health, housing and schools are of the highest concern to Servicemen, and the medical and dental services also have an operational rôle to perform in war. My right hon. and noble Friend is best placed to decide how much money should be devoted to these social services in the interests of defence, and we have therefore decided that on balance it would


be best for the expenditure to remain within the defence budget.
I should perhaps add that the bulk of expenditure incurred on educating Servicemen's children already falls on the Department of Education and Science, because the majority of Servicemen's children are educated in the United Kingdom. The need to provide schools abroad, however, stems directly from a major defence principle that, wherever possible, Servicemen abroad should be accompanied by their wives and families. Should we reverse this decision, I am sure there would be a significant—indeed a dramatic—effect on Services recruiting.
My hon. Friend asked for information on the money spent on the services like health and education. I must make two provisos in giving the figures. First, it is not possible to give an accurate figure for the costs of the education services, since major aspects fall under other programmes, notably training and general station and unit costs. The figures for education, therefore, represent a very broad estimate. The same is true, though to a lesser extent, of the figures given for the health service. The second proviso is that we must decide what should be classed as social security services. But, with those two broad provisos, the provision in the Defence Estimates, 1972–73, for health were £56 million, for social security £171 million, and for education £32 million, making a total of £259 million. The bulk of social security expenditure—£141 million—is in respect of Service pensions. But I must say, apart from the arguments I have developed, that if we removed these elements from the defence budget, which would be contrary to the normal NATO practice, we could assume that the defence budget would automatically be reduced by a commensurate amount.

Mr. Geoffrey Finsberg: My right hon. Friend has given some valuable figures, which are much greater than we have even been led to believe, and the Sub-Committee will want to study them. My right hon. Friend has also said that basically our presentation is very much in line with the practice of our NATO allies. Does he agree that we are probably the only country that makes a fetish of keeping our defence expenditure at a fixed level, which perhaps makes us somewhat different?

Lord Balniel: There is a certain truth in what my hon. Friend says. It backs up what the hon. Member for Sutton was saying, if I do not misinterpret him. People in this country in many ways make a great fetish about the proportion of the GNP spent on defence, and compare with the proportion spent by other countries in Western Europe. The hon. Member for Salford, East (Mr. Frank Allaun) asked whether we were not spending a higher proportion than any other Western European country. We are spending less in real terms than France and Germany. Surely the criterion by which we should judge our defence expenditure is not so much the proportion of the GNP compared with that of our allies but the capabilities of those who could be potential aggressors?
Various hon. Members asked about married accommodation in Germany. There is no doubt that any hon. Member visiting Germany finds when talking to guardsmen, troopers or soldiers throughout BAOR that that is the first subject raised. There is a problem here, but over and above the substantial stock of married accommodation already available to BAOR, acquisition of a further 4,500 married quarters is in hand. Plans for the acquisition of a further 4,000 quarters are well advanced and we calculate that these two acquisitions will largely satisfy the demand from the Army for married accommodation in Germany.

Mr. Tilney: Can my right hon. Friend say whether that acquisition will be hired or bought?

Lord Balniel: Perhaps I can write to my hon. Friend so that I can give him an accurate reply. I would also like to write to him about another point he raised concerning the re-negotiation of the NATO agreement with Germany. This involves discussions with our NATO ally and it is correct that, speaking on the Floor of the House, I should ensure that the information is absolutely accurate.
The hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Mr. Boyden) also raised the question of single-room accommodation for soldiers in barracks. Approval has just been obtained for the scale in which single rooms can be provided in barracks. The scale will be implemented as we re-build and modernise existing blocks


both at home and in Germany. The proposal is to convert one-third of the accommodation at Aldershot into single-room accommodation, while two-thirds will consist of rooms for four men.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clitheroe (Mr. David Walder) and my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Devonport referred to the number of SSAFA Sisters assigned to BAOR. The SSAFA nursing service is most remarkable and most valuable, and the Services greatly appreciate the work the nurses do. A SSAFA Sister carries out all the duties of a health visitor and school nurse and in addition part of the work of district nurse. midwife and health clinic nurse. Certainly, the Services and I believe, the House will be pleased that we have been able so quickly to implement the recommendation of the Committee and increase the number of SSAFA Sisters assigned to BAOR by 12.

Dame Joan Vickers: Are they pensionable? How long will they serve there?

Lord Balniel: My hon. Friend referred in her speech to the terms of reference of the SSAFA Sisters serving in BAOR and I will write to her about the pension aspect.
Another recommendation of the Committee concerned the provision of television. This I am afraid is a much more difficult problem. It is very expensive, for example, but my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army is having discussions with representatives of the BBC and the ITA to see whether they can help.
Yet another recommendation concerns stores accounting, a matter on which my hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead laid great emphasis. We are in full sympathy with the Committee's objective of simplifying procedures and giving commanding officers the fullest possible delegated powers compatible with the necessary minimum overall control. These are intricate topics and a great deal of attention has been focused on them in recent times. There has been a substantial simplification. There has been a great deal of delegation of powers and as a result some 97 per cent. of the stores losses arising from causes other than theft, fraud, arson or sabotage fall well within the write-off powers of com-

manding officers of lieut.-colonel or wing-commander rank. We shall keep this matter continuously under review and the House will be interested to know that the Director-General of Internal Audit comes from ICI and is greatly experienced in this subject.
A number of hon. Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for Bradford, West (Mr. Wilkinson) and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Eye—referred to the use of helicopters. With their knowledge, they will know that operational exercises are being conducted to see how helicopters can best be employed.
The Sub-Committee suggested greater use of medium-lift helicopters, a proposal which was extremely attractive to defence Ministers but rather less attractive to the Treasury. Here the difficulty is cost. To carry 500 tons daily over a distance of 50 miles would need 10 medium-lift helicopters at a capital cost of about £10 million and annual running costs of £1·6 million. To do the same job by road would need at most 50 10-ton lorries at a capital cost of about £600,000 and annual running costs of £400,000.
On grounds of costs alone the concept is not being considered further but we are keeping under review the possibility of introducing some large helicopters suitable for war-time logistic tasks and we are also examining the implications of a limited use of existing helicopters for supporting Harriers in the field.
The last matter to which I would like to refer is that which has been dealt with by almost every hon. Member who has spoken, namely standardisation.

Mr. Hattersley: Might I suggest that that might be the pen-ultimate matter and the right hon. Gentleman might say a word by way of a progress report on the through-deck cruiser about which almost every hon. Member has spoken?

Lord Balniel: The through-deck cruiser is an important element in the construction programme over the next decade. We hope to order the first ship towards the end of this financial year for acceptance in 1978. The task of the through-deck cruiser is three-fold. It has three main capabilities, the deployment of the Sea King anti-submarine helicopter, the command and control of a maritime air force, namely the command


systems which will bring maritime air control to the support of the Navy, and there is also the contribution made by the Sea Dart system of area air defence. Should further options be taken up they will be able to operate VSTOL aircraft. The decision will be taken towards the end of this financial year.

Mr. Dalyell: Do the Government realise that some of us marvel at the prospect, not only of having one £60 million through-deck cruiser but at hearing of the possibility of more than one, to coincide with the 1975–84 expenditure which will be at its peak with MRCA and other projects such as Sea Wolf?

Lord Balniel: These things have been taken into account and they are open to debate when the Estimates incorporating them are put before the House. That is the moment for the House to bring constructive criticism to bear.
I was referring to the question of standardisation. A certain amount has been achieved. There has been the Anglo-French aeronautical projects, the MRCA, the FH70 towed Howitzer. We accepted that this is an area where progress has been nothing like as fast as we would like to see and there are real problems to be overcome. There are different operational requirements, differing time-scales, differing economic resources. There is the national or chauvenistic interest, very naturally, to ensure the well-being of national industries. The problems

tend to increase when we try to achieve standardisation or collaboration with more than two or three different countries.
I hope that these problems will gradually be overcome but they are very real indeed. As the evidence of the Secretary of State made clear, he attaches immense importance to securing success in this area. We will have been in office for three years by next year. The first year, in defence terms, was devoted to what in defence jargon is known as "AD 70" concerning projects and studies of the problems of the late 1970s. The second year has been devoted to EDIP, and my right hon. Friend is making it his purpose in the third year to place great emphasis on achieving collaboration on major projects, such as the main battle tank of the next generation. This is a slow, inexorable process, which is very difficult to achieve, but without achieving it the defences of the Western world are greatly weakened.
I have tried to answer as best I can the multitudinous points that have been raised. I apologise to the House for detaining it for so long.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,
That this House takes note of the Second Report and the Fifth Special Report from the Expenditure Committee and of the subsequent evidence reported from the Defence and External Affairs Sub-Committee of that Committee.

Orders of the Day — HORSERACE TOTALISATOR AND BETTING LEVY BOARDS BILL

As amended (in the Standing Committee), considered.

New Clause 1

REMISSION OF CONTRIBUTIONS DUE FROM TOTALISATOR BOARD TO LEVY BOARD

"The Levy Board shall have power to remit in whole or in part any sums outstanding at the passing of this Act in respect of the contributions payable to that Board by the Totalisator Board as mentioned in section 24(1) of the Act of 1963'.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

8.51 p.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Mark Carlisle): I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu): With this proposed new Clause we are to discuss sub-Amendment (a), leave out 'in whole or in part' and insert 'up to one quarter of'; new Clause 39—(Payments by Board); new Clause 47—(Power of Levy Board to remit surplus revenue to Totalisator Board); new Clause 53—(Payments by Totalisator Board (timing)); new Clause 54—(Assessment by Levy Board of contribution); new Clause 72—(Remission by Levy Board of payments by Totalisator Board); new Clause 73—(Scale of remission by Levy Board to be determined by profits made by Totalisator Board); Amendment No. 61; Amendment No. 66; Amendment No. 67, and Amendment No. 81.

Mr. Carlisle: The Government Amendments hang together. The effect of the Amendments and the new Clause is, first, to delete—by way of Amendment No. 66—what is now Clause 6 of the Bill, then, by Amendment No. 61 to repeat Clause 6(2) as part of Clause 4, and, by new Clause 1, to provide a new power, namely, power to the Levy Board to remit in whole or in part any outstanding indebtedness of the Totalisator Board to the Levy Board.
Hon. Members involved in the Committee stage will remember that Clause 6

—Clause 5 as it was when the Bill started its life—enabled the Levy Board to give financial assistance to the Totalisator Board by way of grant, or by making or giving guarantees, or by loan. I made it clear in Committee that the Government had no intention of making the Totalisator Board a permanent pensioner of the Levy Board; that the intention was to enable the Levy Board to advance money to the Tote Board in the short term for the purpose of meeting its present financial situation, until it was able to take advantage of the opportunity given it by Clause 1.
I always appreciated the controversial nature of the Clause and the fact that it was felt by some to be a means whereby the Tote Board would be able permanently to receive money from the levy which had been provided by private bookmakers with whom, as a result of Clause 1, it might well be in competition. I made it clear in Committee that that was not the Government's intention, and it was for that purpose that a time limit was imposed in Clause 5. However, since the completion of the Committee stage, the Government have had an opportunity to look again at Clause 6 in the light of what I am glad to say is the very heartening improvement in the Tote's financial situation compared with some of the gloomy prognostications made about it in Committee.
Therefore, as the purpose of that Clause was to enable the Tote Board to obtain short-term financial assistance, if necessary, from the Levy Board, the Government have concluded, in the light of the Tote Board's present situation and the financial difference made to the Tote by the decision of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to lower the on-course duty, that the Tote Board no longer requires or is likely to require short-term financial assistance from the Levy Board.
The purpose therefore of Amendment No. 66 is to delete Clause 6. I am sure that that will be welcome to hon. Members on both sides, and I believe that it will be welcome to the Tote Board's new Chairman, who I am sure is anxious to show that the board is capable of being viable in its own right.
However, in Committee, the Government added to Clause 6 a new subsection, subsection (2), the purpose of which was


declaratory. It was to make clear that the Levy Board, under its normal powers in the 1963 Act, could make payments to the Tote Board for assisting the Tote Board to provide facilities for sponsored pool betting on approved racecourses on the basis that that was a purpose conducive to the improvement of horse racing. I do not think there was any dispute that the Tote must retain various totalistaors on small racecourses which are financially unviable but whose very presence is conducive to horse racing.
Therefore, the effect of Amendment No. 61 is to retain that power so that the Levy Board will still be able to give financial assistance, should it choose to do so, either to the Tote Board or to those people who have the management of the totalisator on those courses, to help in the running of the uneconomic totalisators on some of the racecourses.
9 p.m.
By new Clause 1 power would be given to the Levy Board to choose if it so wishes to write off the present indebtedness of the Totalisator Board to the Levy Board. This to a large extent is historical. Since the 1961 Act, which set up the Betting Levy Board and brought to an end the old Racecourse Betting Control Board, the Totalisator Board took on an indebtedness of some £626,440 to the Levy Board as an agreed balance, which it received at that stage, of the assets and liabilities of the Betting Control Board. During the ensuing years payments have been made from the Totalisator Board in respect of the annual levy, with payments in respect of the original liability, but the fact remains that at this moment there is still left outstanding—at the end of the financial year, at 31st March, 1971 —a sum of £465,605 as the indebtedness of the Totalisator Board to the Levy Board.
If the principle of this Bill is to succeed, which is to provide for the future of a viable Tote, then, as I am sure almost all hon. Members on both sides of the House agree, it is only reasonable to the new chairman of that board and to the other members of the board at present, and future ones who may be appointed, that they should be given the opportunity to do that without having the millstone round their neck of a present indebtedness of very nearly £500.000.
Therefore, the effect of new Clause 1 is to enable the Levy Board to have power to remit the sum, should it wish to do so. At the moment, I am advised, the Levy Board, even if it wished, has no power to remit the sum. Whether it chooses to do so will, of course, remain a matter for the Levy Board, but I believe it would have the opportunity to do so, so that the new Totalisator Board with its extended powers under this Bill, may become, as I am confident it will become, and will continue to be, a viable organisation able to provide an alternative method of betting to that provided by the private bookmaker, and at the same time, being non-profit making, giving its share towards the upkeep of racing in this country. I think it is right that it should have the opportunity to achieve that end without an inherited indebtedness of this kind.
That is all I wish to say about the new Clause and the two Amendments proposed by the Government. As to the various Amendments to be taken with them I would just say to the hon. Gentleman for West, Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) that his proposed Amendment to my new Clause 1, the Amendment which would enable the board to write off an indebtedness of one-quarter, has no advantage or purpose, if I may say so with respect.
The purpose of new Clause 53 and new Clause 54, as I understand them, is to say that no levy should be payable by the Totalisator Board to the Levy Board till 1975. I can only assume that the hon. Gentleman put down those Amendments to support the interests of the tote.
It is the Governments' hope, as it is of the new Chairman, that the Totalisator Board should, as rapidly as its finances permit, be able to contribute to the Levy. That is in part the purpose of giving the Levy Board the opportunity to write off the existing indebtedness, so that the Totalisator Board can be seen to be making a contribution to that fund. It is neither desirable nor in the interests of the totalisator that that power should be prohibited until 1975, irrespective of how rapidly the financial situation improves.
I therefore commend the new Clause to the House to enable the board to start off without a millstone of indebtedness round its neck, by providing that the Levy Board can assist the Tote Board in


running its uneconomic services on totes on course, but, on the other hand, withdrawing the overall power which the Bill originally gave to the Levy Board to advance money to the Tote Board.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: Before moving my Amendment to new Clause 1, I should like to make few comments on the Minister's opening remarks. He referred to the heartening situation of the Tote since the passage of the Bill in Committee. On Second Reading we were told what a perilous state the Totalisator Board was in and how terrible it was that we should have to come to the aid not of a lame duck industry but of a lame horse industry. From 20th April to 22nd June the Committee went through the Bill, and even gave permission to the Minister to adjourn the Committee so that he could go on a flip to the EEC. We were told how necessary it was to get the Bill through, yet now we are told that this lame horse industry is not in a perilous state.
Not only has the House been misled, but the Minister appears to have been misled. According to information published in Sporting Life, the Tote Board has made £250,000 profit, less corporation tax—a net sum of about £100,000. The Minister will know the true figure; perhaps he will give us that information when he replies. I do not know whether this is due to the fact that the board has now a progressive, go-ahead chairman and that since the time he took over he has been able to make a success of this so-called lame duck industry.

Mr. Carlisle: The hon. Gentleman might concede that it only shows that all the vilification he continually poured on the previous chairman was unjustified. He might be man enough to admit it.

Mr. Lewis: I was only going on the information given to Parliament by the board. After all, I did not introduce the Bill; I did not say the board was hard-pressed and hard up. The Minister and the Government said those things. I was under the impression that the board was in great difficulty. We now hear that that is not the case.
Since I felt the board was in difficulties I tabled a few Amendments, which fortunately have been selected, to enable

the board to become a little more profitable. However, today, which is probably the last day of the proceedings, we are told that the board is not in such dire need and that this makes my Amendments probably unnecessary. I was seeking to be helpful by relieving the board of a number of its outgoings so that it could make a profit. In new Clause 39 I suggest that the Levy Board should take over from the Totalisator Board payment of rates and taxes. I thought that this would relieve the Totalisator Board of some of the difficulty. Had I been told earlier that the Tote Board was not in such a perilous situation, my new Clause would not have been necessary.

Mr. W. R. Rees-Davies: Therefore, the hon. Gentleman does not now need to deal with all these voluminous Amendments which stand in his name on the Paper, since he appears to accept what my hon. and learned Friend said on new Clause 1. Therefore, we can save time, at least on this part of the Report stage, and not trouble to deal with all the hon. Gentleman's other Amendments which now become unnecessary.

Mr. Lewis: Mr. Lewis The hon. Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) may have jumped the gun. He says that we do not now need my Amendments because the situation is different. But we were told a different story a few weeks ago.

I do not blame the Minister; I think he was misled—though not by the present Chairman and the present Board. The Minister then gave information which has not proved to be correct. How do we know that the Totalisator Board has even now given the correct information and that the earlier information was wrong? In case it is not correct, my Amendments seek to help the board a little more.

Mr. Rees-Davies: There is not a suggestion that the information which has been given is wrong. The information that the board had a deficit over a period was right; the information that it no longer has that deficit at present is right. It is the circumstances which have changed and they have been adumbrated today. The first is the change in the tax, and the second change relates to the arrangements which have been made with the bookmakers. They make the situation totally different.

Mr. Lewis: No. The hon. Gentleman must remember that the report and accounts relate to the past year and that the Finance Bill was passed only recently. As a result, the benefits proposed in the Finance Bill will not yet apply, though certainly they will apply in the future. The false information given previously was the information then available. The new improvements will affect only the future, not the past. New Clause 39 gives the Tote Board the chance to be relieved of its outgoings in terms of rates and taxes and charges.
9.15 p.m.
New Clause 47 provides that all surpluses of the Levy Board, less £10,000 for its day-to-day administration, should be allocated in toto to the Tote Board. I am being of great help to the Tote Board. In Committee I was accused of trying to attack the Tote Board. I must agree that that was the case. I did so because I believed the information that the House was given. I believed that the Tote Board was in great difficulty. Having been convinced in Committee, having heard all the arguments and having been persuaded by all those who supported the Tote, I felt that I had to admit I was wrong, that it was in dire trouble and, therefore, that the Levy Board should come even further to its aid and give all its surplus to help it other than £10,000 administrative expenses.
New Clause 53 provides that the Tote Board may be excluded from payment to the Levy Board until 1975. I am being very generous here. I am giving the Tote Board a five-year period of grace by providing that it shall not be liable to the Levy Board's levy for five years. This is very generous, but I am a very generous man.
If I had known that the Tote Board was not in such dire trouble, the probability is that I would not have tabled these Amendments. But I have to be sure what is the information. It is quite new. We have heard about the changed circumstances only in the last two or three weeks.
New Clause 54 is similar to the previous one.
New Clause 72 allows the Levy Board to remit in whole or in part moneys owing to the Levy Board where the

Totalisator Board has a profit of less than £100,000. This is marvellous thinking on my part. I did not know at the time that the Tote Board had made a profit of £100,000. I did not know that the accounts were to be published. I must have guessed that this would be very helpful. It seems to be the sort of figure which might be applicable in this case.
It is true that I thought that probably £100,000 might be a bit high as the sum at which to fix a reasonable profit for the Tote Board. It was with that in mind that I tabled new Clause 73, which is similar in terms to the previous one except that I have reduced the £100,000 to £50,000. I realised that £100,000 for the poor Tote Board, which was always making a loss and was always in difficulty, might be a bit much. I fixed the figure at £50,000 in new Clause 73, taking the view that if new Clause 72 were not acceptable, new Clause 73 might be. All these are helpful proposals which the Minister may be inclined to accept.
This is a shocking example of a waste of parliamentary time.

Mr. Rees-Davies: No.

Mr. Lewis: It is. It was the Minister. not I, who said that the Totalisator Board was going bankrupt and that a Bill must be rushed through to deal with this matter, to take preference, incidentally, over a Bill to deal with the needs of old-age pensioners or with the "lame horse" industry. However, the Minister was misled and, in the process of his being misled, every Member of the Committee was misled.

Mr. Rees-Davies: None of us was misled. I quoted the odds accurately, namely, that it was two to one on that the hon. Gentleman would be speaking at any given time between 20th April and 22nd June. During the sittings of the Committee the hon. Gentleman said nearly twice as much as all the other members of the Committee put together. I hope that there will not be a repetition tonight.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I hope not, too. If the hon. Gentleman does not interrupt me in every other sentence, we shall be able to make progress. After all, I have introduced five new Clauses and five Amendments in about four minutes. The


hon. Gentleman as a lawyer should know that it is not advisable to teed ammunition to one's opponent. Like the Minister, the hon. Gentleman should table a Motion congratulating the hon. Member for West Ham, North on having had the chance to have this matter thoroughly debated in Committee so as to delay the proceedings long enough for the Totalisator Board, albeit reluctantly, to come forward with the facts, thus enabling the Minister to table the new Clause and the Amendments. Had it not been for my efforts in Committee in delaying proceedings to enable the truth to out, the Minister would not have had the opportunity of tabling these wonderful Amendments. So the hon. Gentleman should congratulate me on my efforts, not castigate me.
I hope that before the debate ends the Minister will, in his usual charming manner, pay me a tribute for enabling him to table the Amendments which he could have tabled in Committee but did not. Similar Amendments were tabled by hon. Members in Committee but the Minister did not accept them. Almost every one of the Amendments tabled by the Minister on Report originates from points of views expressed by hon. Members in Committee, including my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden).
My main objection on Second Reading and in Committee was that I saw no reason to debate horseracing or to look after bookmakers and the betting and racing fraternities when far more urgent and important things needed to be done. However, in Committee I was persuaded that there might have been a case. My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (Mr. Ashton), speaking for the Totalisator Board, persuaded me that I was probably wrong. Now at the last moment, when the House is about to rise for the Summer Recess, I learn that all the information which persuaded me that I was wrong was wrong and that I was right.
The Minister now says that he is going to do all the things that he was aked to do in Committee, and all the things which the Minister and I turned down we are now to agree to. I cannot oppose the Minister, but I am pleased at long last to see some penitence on the part of the Department. Had this been done in Committee, the Bill could have gone

through within a few days, or even within a few hours, and we should not have had to spend all this time on it today.
In deference to the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet I shall not explain all the new Clauses and Amendments at length. They are all good proposals and they are along the lines of what the Minister wanted in Committee.

Mr. Rees-Davies: I shall be brief, but after what the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) said I think we ought to follow what the Minister said and get the matter into a right perspective, at any rate for those outside the House who want to understand what had happened. The new Clause is probably the best place in which to do it.
The Totalisator Board was right to press the Home Office, and therefore the Home Secretary, to introduce a Bill. At that time there was considerable financial difficulty in making ends meet. It was necessary that we should be sure that we were not left with a bankrupt totalisator which could have led to a complete monopoly by the bookmaking profession.
That meant that we had to give certain powers, and one of the things that was most necessary was to enable a grant or loan to be made to the totalisator. It was known—and it is a fact—that there was a debt of about £500,000 and that it was going into the red at the rate of at least £250,000 a year—probably £500,000 a year. Consequently, it was necessary to introduce a Bill of this kind.
Furthermore, it was necessary to find some method by which we could make the Tote viable, and the method chosen by the Government was to give it the opportunity not merely to be full betting operators and run a tote, but also to have the chance to be bookmakers both off and on the course. The Clause is linked to the other new Clauses which we shall deal with later, in particular new Clause 3. Therefore, in looking at the matter in the round one first had to see whether it was necessary to inject money into the Tote—and it was, and it still is—and, secondly, to see how that could be done.
One way was to inject Government money in the form of loans either through the Levy Board or in effect direct. Happily, this evening the Government are


able to withdraw Clause 6 which gives power for the Levy Board to make grants or loans to the Tote, and at the same time new Clause 1, if the House accepts it, and I feel sure that it will, writes off £500,000 debt which is a debt only in this sense, that the Tote has been unable to earn the necessary moneys to pay the grant that it had to pay. It is not a debt as we understand the word. It is a failure to meet the proper obligation imposed upon it. It seems that both those are right.
But the reason for not continuing with the grant and for having a Second Reading and a Committee stage has given us the time and opportunity to consider other administrative measures which have really achieved the purpose that has been set out. In Committee I said that the only way by which the racing industry could save itself was by its own exertions, and that applies to both greyhounds and horses.
With regard to horse racing, it was necessary in particular to see a new type of corporation merging between the public, the bookmaker and the totalisator. There was signally absent any kind of effective co-operation in particular between the bookmaking fraternity and the Tote.
9.30 p.m.
Therefore, it is an integral part of the debate, and the withdrawal of Clause 6 giving grants and loans, that the bookmakers and the Totalisator have now got together. It is essential that they should do so because if there was to be a thriving industry as exists at present, for example, in France, and if we were to be able to have racing for those who enjoy it at lower rates when they go on the course and pay for their day's outing, and if people were to go racing and thereby increase the number going racing rather than being the stay-at-home people who make no contribution, it was necessary to ensure that the Totalisator and the bookmakers got together.
This they have done, and, as I understand it, it means that we in this country will see the benefits of the tierce and the jackpot. We will see the introduction of the tierce along the French lines but by means of a new British system to be introduced, and which will be promoted

for the benefit of the Totalisator. It will operate on one main race on a Saturday and the Tote will get the full benefit of it, but the agents for the Tote will be in the betting offices operated by the bookmakers. This will provide the real money, and will ensure that there will in future be a minimum income for the Totalisator of £1 million a year coming from the operation of the jackpot, the Totalisator and other matters of that kind.
This will be something which ought to assure in the main the revenue which in due course will inure to the benefit of the Levy Board and of racing, and will therefore be helpful and conducive to the interests of racing as laid down in the principles for which the Tote was originally created to promote.
It is essential that the Tote should operate, in the main, the betting offices on the course which are now being operated. Until very recently we did not have any betting on course. We had the Tote on course and we also had the genuine on course bookmakers but, on the other hand, we did not have the starting price operating for the benefit mainly of other courses on the course. This can now come about. This will be utilising much of the space which belongs to the Totalisator and this, again, should inure to the benefit of the Totalisator.
For these reasons, it seems to me that the Government are much to be congratulated on what they have done here. They are to be congratulated because they were right in initiating it, and they are very much to be congratulated on listening very carefully to all those concerned in the racing industry. In particular, my hon. and learned Friend is to be congratulated on seeing that Lord Mancroft together with those with him were concerned in response to requests made in Committee, so that he and the bookmakers have got together. There is nothing that the Government can do. The Government cannot lay down legislation in this field, it is not part of their duty, but they can give the opportunity for these others to come together, as they have done.
Now we can see the results of the Government's measures, one of them being the introduction of the changes in the Finance Bill in June, after the Bill had


gone into Committee, which provide for a lower differential for on course betting. This must be of great benefit to the Tote. So all these matters have been altered. It would be wrong to criticise them by what would be hindsight by suggesting that they should have guessed all these matters 12 months ago, because by their action they have promoted a climate of opinion in racing here, the result of which has been to achieve these advantages and to set this industry now along the right path. That is why I commend new Clause 1 and also the removal of Clause 6 as sought by Amendment No. 66. In this way we will have gone a long way to setting things along the right path and in accordance with the principles which we on this side like to support.

Mr. Albert Roberts: I was amused by the speech of the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) who said that it was in the best interests" if the bookmakers and the Totalisator Board co-operated. Did he mean in order to carve up the public? I am disappointed about the change. It is a change certainly of course, if not of intent. I should like to be clear about it.
The Minister has changed his mind after considering the Amendment to which I spoke in Committee on 4th May concerning off-course betting on greyhounds. We are concerned not only with greyhounds and horse racing but with other sports. There will be nothing to prevent the board from purchasing a string of betting shops and then engaging in off-course betting on greyhounds. That would be entirely wrong.
The consensus in Committee was in favour of the Amendment and the Minister promised to consider co-operating with myself and other hon. Members. I am given to understand now that there is a change of action and I wonder whether it is a change of view. If we are to do the right thing at the right time there will have to be a change in outlook. I wonder whether it would be possible at this late stage to obtain an undertaking from the Minister about off-course betting and the Totalisator Board.

Mr. Carlisle: The hon. Member should realise that Amendments Nos. 27, 28, 29, 30 and 31 deal with this matter. What we are discussing has nothing to do with greyhounds. I should warn him, how-

ever, that I shall not be sympathetic to him on those later Amendments.

Mr. Roberts: I appreciate that we shall be dealing with that in a moment, but I was making general observations because I was disappointed with what the Minister had said.

Mr. John Page: I welcome Amendment No. 66 which deletes Clause 6 and I support New Clause 1 which seems to be a sensible proposal. I congratulate the Minister on these and other Amendments which he has put forward and I feel that at this stage we have to congratulate him for the way he handled the Committee Stage and for the way he has brought forward new Amendments, which are entirely due to changing circumstances which it was not his responsibility to foresee.
I am not proposing to intervene again unless violently obliged to do so. The debates which took place focussed attention on the management of racing as a whole and that has been beneficial in many ways. I hope my hon. Friend will not overlook at some later date, when he comes to consider a new Statutory authority for racing, the Committee of Inquiry under Sir Henry Benson, and I hope that he can persuade the Government, when there is a slack moment in the parliamentary programme, in a few months time, to introduec a short Bill on the subject.

Mr. Brian Walden: I begin by declaring a financial interest in this matter. Though it is, I suppose, the most single important section of the Report stage, I do not intend to speak at any length, but I should like to make two or three comments.
First, I see no objection at all to what the Minister has left in, as he put it. New Clause 1 is not objectionable, for it seems reasonable, particularly in view of the way in which the financial obligation came about, that the Levy Board, if it wishes—and the Minister has said and the Bill says no more than that—may remit amounts which are outstanding from the Totalisator Board. It does not seem to me that we should hedge that concession around with any restrictions. I see no reason why that power should not go through, and I welcome new Clause 1.


Similarly, I do not see why, for the benefit of horse racing, the Levy Board should not be empowered to advance certain sums to the Totalisator Board, and the Minister described that part of new Clause 6 as being declaratory. On the other hand, I greatly welcome the fact that Clause 6 has been taken out of the Bill, and it is probably worth saying a word or two on that subject.
First, I congratulate the Minister. It is always difficult, and, by some odd convention of the House, which I confess I have never understood, though I have often seen put into practice. for Ministers to change their minds. It is somehow felt to be wrong, to be infra dig, to be a reflection on the Administration.
The Minister has changed his mind and he has done so because there has come to him information that he did not have and could not have had before as to the financial viability of the board, and there were also the things mentioned by the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) which have been agreed in discussions between representatives of the Totalisator Board and the bookmakers, and I will mention those in a moment. The Minister has wisely decided in view of this information and in view of the concession made during the course of the Finance Bill in regard to the on-course market to take out Clause 6, saying in effect that there is no reason why the Levy Board should have to advance substantial sums to the Totalisator Board, and I think that that is right.
On the evidence we have before us, there is no reason why the old Clause 5, the new Clause 6, should have stayed in the Bill in that form and the hon. and learned Gentleman has pleased not only me but many of his hon. Friends by simply taking it out, by responding to the situation as it exists. I commend not only his wisdom, but his courage in that he has been prepared to do that and not to waste the time of the House by trying to argue for something that would have been extremely controversial in view of the facts that we now have.
I do not want to say much more except to take up what the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet said about co-operation between the Totalisator Board and the bookmakers—and here I refer to my attitude in Committee and to that of the

Minister. At every stage the Minister said that if it could be shown to him that there was a way of assisting the Totalisator Board into permanent viability without having to have recourse to some of the provisions of the Bill, he would gladly listen to any suggestion and would do all he could to facilitate it and would then be prepared to change the Bill to take account of those circumstances.
The Minister has been as good as his word; that is exactly what he has done. He has facilitated talks of the kind that the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet believes will mean a new era for British racing, as I believe is the case and as a result, not entirely but partly, of the talks the Minister has been prepared to make certain changes in the Bill. I commend him for that, too. At every stage he said that he would do that if the opportunity arose and when the opportunity arose, he did.
9.45 p.m.
I said in Committee at pretty well every stage that I was convinced that if the bookmakers could talk to the Totalisator Board about their suggestions to ensure the Tote's viability the board would find that what was being offered was substantial and calculable and would produce the necessary viability. I shall not go into details of private negotiations other than to say that I think that that situation has come about, and that the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet is right in assuming that there will be a new era of co-operation between the Totalisator Board and the private bookmakers, with the private bookmakers on the Tierce and the jackpot, acting as agents of the board to produce a substantial revenue.
Therefore, it has all ended happily—lengthily, no doubt, in Committee terms, but happily. As we are all handing out bouquets freely, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) on the commendable brevity with which he spoke to the new Clauses and his sub-Amendments.
I think that the discussions in Committee were of value and that the Minister has honoured to the full the assurances he gave. New Clause 1 is absolutely acceptable, and I think that the Minister was right to remove the old Clause 5,


the new Clause 6. In other words, I think that the Bill as now drafted in relation at least to what we are now discussing—new Clause 1 and the omission of new Clause 6—is entirely right, as it should be, and something to which nobody in racing who had studied the issue could have serious objections.

Mr. J. R. Kinsey: I join the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) in congratulating the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis). If we accept the arguments of the hon. Member for West Ham, North we must agree that it was the length of time he took in Committee that has allowed the results of the Totalisator for this year to be known. The hon. Gentleman proves that it is a long ill wind that blows nobody any good. It is good news that the Totalisator's finances for the past year have improved. My hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State had been working on figures for previous years, which had been dismal, and on the forecast for this year, which was also dismal. The results have been much better than anyone expected. It is good to know that the new chairman is confident that the Totalisator will work better in the future. We all wish the new chairman well in that.
I am glad that Clause 6 is being taken out of the Bill. The justice sought by the bookmakers has been provided by my hon. and learned Friend.
Like the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints and my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies), I am pleased that the National Association of Bookmakers has played its part in making the Totalisator a viable proposition for the future. I hope that the co-operation will continue.
I echo the many thanks to my hon. and learned Friend. I am pleased that he was flexible and ready to act so quickly when he had the forecasts. I am most grateful to him for what he has done.

Mr. Arthur Davidson: I congratulate the Minister on one thing—his coolness in presenting the new Clause and the Amendments. He did it in a way which suggested that they were minor drafting Amendments which were of little consequence and which the House would

accept without much debate. They are not minor Amendments at all. The Minister has altered the whole emphasis of the Bill, and my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthui Lewis) is absolutely correct. Much as I respect and like the Minister personally, he cannot expect to get away scot-free, despite the congratulations of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden), who is very well pleased.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints represents, as he has openly stated and is entitled to do, the interests of the National Association of Bookmakers, and of course the association is quite content with what the Minister of State has done. The bookmakers objected from the start to Clause 5, which has subsequently been elevated to Clause 6. They objected in principle. They did not like the thought of the Levy Board being able to give subsidies, grants, guarantees or money in any form to the Totalisator Board, since they themselves, understandably, had contributed to the Levy Board. That being the case, all the nonsense we had in Committee about five-year guarantees and time limits and limits on the money was really irrelevant and spurious. It was not my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North who wasted the time of the Committee but the Minister of State. I admit that my hon. Friend made odd relevant interjections from time to time, but nevertheless the Minister came out with a succession of Amendments which we now learn, to our astonishment, were wholly unnecessary.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: My hon. Friend has paid tribute to the Minister of State, in which I join. Will he also pay tribute to the Opposition? The Opposition Whips were going around to get the quorum to enable the Committee to continue. Had it not been for the Opposition Whips the Committee would have collapsed on several occasions.

Mr. Davidson: Of course the Opposition Whip on the Committee, who is sitting on my right, deserves every congratulation because he, like myself, represents one person—or, rather, several million—the average punter. I find it a little offensive that in what is, after all, an industry financed by small punters, who are rarely mentioned, matters should be decided behind closed doors between


representatives of the Totalisator Board and the bookmakers, a circle into which the punter has not been invited and to which he has no access.
The Minister of State says that there has been a change of circumstances. He says that he has now heard that the gloomy prognostication which we got before and which he conveyed to the House with a great deal of gloom have not transpired and that the Tote has made a profit. What profit has it made? The hon. and learned Gentleman cannot just tell us that things are now better than they were without telling us what evidence he has for saying so. He has withdrawn what he claimed to be an essential Clause, although neither my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North nor I thought it essential.
Although I believe that the Government are capable of almost anything, I do not think that they put in Clauses for the sake of doing so. We were told that this was an essential Clause and now, after weeks and weeks of debate in Committee, we are told that it is not necessary after all. How does it come about that it is now not necessary? It is no good the hon. and learned Gentleman saying that he is now led to believe that the Tote is in better financial condition than it was before without also telling us just what its financial condition now is. It is no good his telling us what the financial condition is without telling us where he gets the information. Who informed him in the first place that the Tote was in such a perilous state that we had to have this massive Bill? The Minister has been less than informative to the House and the Committee.
I was interested to hear the optimistic sentiments of the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies). He talked loftily about the tiercé, and the jackpot and how beneficial these two methods of betting would be for the industry. We do not know that the agreement reached between the National Association of Bookmakers and the Tote of necessity means that the bookmakers will operate the tiercé system which is a complicated one and which I will not attempt to describe because I really do not understand it. We cannot presume that is the case and we cannot presume that the bookmakers will operate the jackpot for

the benefit of the Tote. If there has been an agreement reached between the bookmakers and the Totalisator Board of which the Minister is aware, he ought to tell us about it.
I hope that the Minister will tell us before Third Reading because he might have changed his mind by then. I hope that Third Reading is taken tonight because I would hate to have to come again and hear him put the Clause back. I am not opposed to his taking the Clause out; at the same time I was not opposed to his putting it in because in my naivety I believed what he told me, as did the Committee. I am sure that the Opposition will not oppose this because, naïvely, we will believe the information that we have been given.
I agree about new Clause 1. It is right to give the Levy Board the power to remit the sums outstanding. We all welcome the appointment of Lord Mancroft but his presence, magical as it may well be, cannot by itself have made the difference between a Tote apparently losing millions of pounds being in a state of bankruptcy and now being in a profitable condition. He has not been there long enough even for him to do that. My hon. Friends will not oppose Amendment No. 66 but I hope that the Minister will be a little more forthcoming and tell us why this volte-face has occurred and why it was not possible to take this out in Committee when many hon. Members. including my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North, were pressing him to do so.
I hope that the Minister will give a belated message of congratulations to my hon. Friend, because had he not continually opposed this it may well be that the Bill would have been passed and these unnecessary provisions would have been on the Statute Book and we would have wasted our time.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: My hon. Friend will be aware that we sat on 22nd June and it is now only 7th August. Surely the Minister could have given this information in Committee if he had known it. I assume that it has come to him between 22nd June and 7th August. It does not really seem possible.

Mr. Davidson: I am sure that the Minister, whom we all respect, would have given us the information if he had


had it. We certainly do not impuge his good faith but it is odd, to say the least, that we have had weeks of debate with all sorts of suggestions, not very novel ones, and yet it is only at the eleventh hour, to use that dramatic phrase, that the Minister comes here and tells us that what everyone has been saying is right and that he is wrong. But he does not tell up upon what he bases his information. I hope that he will now be much more forthcoming.

Mr. Carlisle: With your permission, Mr. Speaker, and that of the House, I should like to reply briefly to the extraordinary speech that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Accrington (Mr. Arthur Davidson). First, his suggestion that I took up a lot of time in Committee I find remarkable, since in view of the length of the Committee stage my contributions were reasonably small—

It being Ten o'clock, the debate stood adjourned.

BUSINESS OF THE HOUSE

Ordered,
That the Horserace Totalisator and Betting Levy Boards Bill, the Land Charges Bill [Lords], the National Debt Bill [Lords] and the Poisons Bill [Lords] may be proceeded with at this day's Sitting, though opposed, until any hour.—[Mr. John Stradling Thomas.]

HORSE RACE TOTALISATOR AND BETTING LEVY BOARDS BILL

Question again proposed, "That the Clause be read a Second time."

Mr. Carlisle: Secondly, the hon. Member talked specifically about the time that I took up or wasted on Clause 5. Since the only Amendment that I moved on that Clause is being retained by Amendment No. 61, which transfers it to Clause 4, it does not appear that I wasted much time. Furthermore, since—according to my recollection—the hon. Member was not present when Clause 5 was debated, it is a little hard of him to accuse me of wasting time.
I do not propose to congratulate the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) because I do not believe that his conduct throughout the whole of the Bill merits his being congratulated.
I made it clear at the time that the purpose of inserting Clause 5 was the need—as then envisaged—for the Totalisator Board to receive financial assistance from the Levy Board until it could take advantage of the opportunities of the Bill.
I also point out to the hon. Member for Accrington that the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mr. Golding), who was at that time deputising for him, said that the Opposition had expressed concern about Clause 5. I understood that it was the wish of the Opposition that if the Clause were found to be no longer necessary the Government should withdraw it.
In fairness, I cannot tell the hon. Member what the final situation will be, since the accounts of the Totalisator Board have not yet been laid before Parliament, but I can say that the outcome for the financial year shows a healthier situation than that which the Government envisaged when the Clause was introduced. I am sure that my noble Friend Lord Mancroft would be the first to accept that these accounts relate to a period before he occupied the chair, but he will welcome the comments that have been made about him although he has no direct responsibility for those accounts. The fact remains that, as I understand, the accounts will show a modest profit for the year, against the statements made that they were likely to show a substantial loss and had shown a loss in the previous year.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: Over the years we have been accustomed, after the event, to find that Press leaks about the Government are invariably correct. Will the Minister confirm or deny that the Press leaks about the board's profit are right or wrong? He knows about the Press leaks. Can he say whether the board is in as healthy a state as is reported?

Mr. Carlisle: They are not Press leaks of the Government. The Totalisator Board is not a part of the Government. I confirm—if it is what the hon. Member wishes me to confirm—that the board's accounts show that it has made a reasonably modest profit during the previous year, as against the loss that at one stage was being forecast by the board. I should have thought that that would be welcomed.


Secondly, I am bound to take account of the likely effect on profitability of decisions taken by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the course of the Budget debate. The combination of these factors leads me to believe that short-term financial aid from the Levy Board will no longer be necessary. That is why I have removed Clause 5.
I can tell the hon. Member for Accrington that to the best of my knowledge—and despite what has been suggested—no agreement has been entered into between the bookmakers and the Totalisator Board. Certainly the circumstances of any agreement are a matter for the Tote Board and for those with whom it negotiates. Therefore, I can only say that within my knowledge no agreement has been entered into between them.
It has been drawn to my attention that, when winding up for the Opposition on

Second Reading, the hon. Member for Accrington was very critical about Clause 5 and said that what he wanted to see was
a position whereby the tote is reorganised on a firm businesslike footing so that it can, with the facilities provided by this Bill, go to the City and borrow money if necessary." —[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd February, 1972; Vol. 830, c. 790.]
In other words, he did not think that Clause 5 was needed. I am happy to tell him that I am satisfied that that situation has been reached. Since it has been said that I have not been prepared to change my mind in view of the changing circumstances, I commend the new Clause and repeat, with respect to the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have great regard, that I was slightly surprised by the tone of his speech.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 4

LICENCES TO ACCEPT BETS AT BOOKMAKERS' PRICES

(1) The authority responsible for granting licences to accept bets at bookmakers' prices shall be the Bookmakers' Committee.
(2) Such licences shall be granted to offices belonging to the Totalisator Board upon payment of a licence fee.
(3) The amount of the fee payable shall be calculated in the same manner in which the Totalisator Board presently calculates the fees paid by bookmakers for authority to accept bets at Totalisator Board prices, namely, a proportion of the levy payment'.—[Mr. Arthur Lewis.]

Brought up, and read the First time.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker: It will be convenient also to discuss new Clause 36—"Copyright fees".

Mr. Lewis: The new Clauses are similar. I am glad that the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) has made his speech and gone because when he keeps intervening it takes up time, and I do not want to be long because I wish the proceedings to be completed as soon as possible.
I hope that the Minister will forgive me if I do not explain the Clause at length, but he has read it. It is, in fact, self-explanatory. Its purpose is to make provision for the Totalisator Board to make bets at bookmakers' prices on licence.

New Clause 36 provides that
The copyright fee payable by a bookmaker who bets at totalisator odds shall be colected by the Horserace Betting Levy Board on behalf of the Totalisator Board and shall be paid by the said bookmakers at the same time as their levy".

The Clause would be administratively useful to the Levy Board, to the Tote Board and to the bookmakers. There may not be good in it, but there is no harm in it.

Mr. Carlisle: I congratulate the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) on the speed with which he moved the new Clause. I promise him that if he maintains his performance during the evening I shall not perhaps

make the unkind remarks which I was minded to make about him.
The purpose of the new Clause is to provide, in effect, that the tote should have to pay a fee for what is called in it "bookmakers' prices", just as the bookmakers pay a fee for settling odds at tote prices. However, I think that the Clause is based on a misunderstanding of the situation. There is no copyright in any form of bookmakers' prices, as the hon. Gentleman refers to it. There is, of course, a copyright provided by Statute on the totalisator prices, and it is for that copyright that the bookmakers pay a fee for the use of totalisator prices.
I am not going to criticise the wording of the hon. Gentleman's new Clause but by "bookmakers' prices" he presumably means either the board prices or the starting prices. As for the board prices, every individual bookmaker can make his own book, and, of course, he works out his own odds which he chooses to give on the basis of the cash being paid into his book. Therefore, no other bookmaker or body is likely to pay out on one board price as such, and even if he did there would be no basis for paying a fee for that service, since it might be that on the cash flow into his business he would make a loss if he paid out a price similar to that offered by another bookmaker.
As for starting prices, starting prices are merely struck by the racing correspondents of certain of the leading racing papers, taking the mean of the various prices being offered by the board and various of the leading bookmakers on the course, and the starting price is then that which is paid out by the bookmakers who are offering the odds and taking bets at starting prices.
There is absolutely no copyright attached to that starting price. Many of the smaller bookmakers who had no part in creating the starting price nevertheless take bets at the starting price and pay no charge for that service. There is no cost involved in assessing what the starting price is.
Therefore, it would be completely inappropriate that the Totalisator should be asked to pay a fee for taking bets at odds which other bookmakers can take free of charge. I think that new Clause 4, if I may say so, starts off on a false assumption as to the distinction between the


totalisator prices and the way they are arrived at and the way starting prices are arrived at.
As to new Clause 36, until recently the copyright fee paid by the bookmaker was paid to the Levy Board and not the Totalisator Board. I understand that this was stopped, and a sum instead was paid to the Totalisator Board, and the previous arrangement came to an end by mutual agreement between the two boards, the procedure being now that the bookmakers tell the totalisator which category, for levy purposes, they are in and the totalisator collects directly from them and checks with the Levy Board that the category quoted is correct. I am advised that the Levy Board is not anxious to resume the rôle of agent for the totalisator and the collection of fees. I understand that there would be no advantage either for the totalisator or the bookmakers if this were to be so, and I think that as the previous arrangement was stopped by mutual consent it would be better to retain the present position.
I understand the purpose of the hon. Gentleman's new Clause but, as I say, in fact there is nothing, without the new Clause, which would prevent the Levy Board from taking over the collection of the copyright fee. I understand that it is unlikely that it would.

Question put and negatived.

New Clause 8

CONTRIBUTION BY TOTALISATOR BOARD

Notwithstanding anything in section 30 of the Act of 1963 or the Horserace Betting Levy Act 1969 the contribution to be made by the Totalisator Board to the Levy Board in respect of business carried on under section 1(1)(b) of this Act shall be determined in accordance with the provisions of the said Acts applicable to the determination of the contribution to be made by bookmakers; and the provisions of the said Acts with respect to the assessment to levy of individual bookmakers shall for the purposes of this section apply to the Totalisator Board as if the Board were a bookmaker.—[Mr. Arthur Lewis.]

Brought up and read the First time

10.15 p.m.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

Mr. Speaker: It will be convenient to take also new Clause 70—"Determination of contributions by Totalisator Board".

Mr. Lewis: The purpose of the new Clause is to make the Totalisator Board and the bookmakers equally assessable for the levy paid to the Levy Board. It used to be said that the Totalisator Board was not properly a bookmaker and it was therefore treated differently. Now that the Totalisator Board is becoming a totalisator board-cum-bookmaker, with assistance, it is only fair that the bookmakers and the Totalisator Board should be treated equally. Justice must not only be done but it must be seen to be done.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints, (Mr. Brian Walden) has put down a new Clause in similar terms and no doubt he will wish to speak to it.

Mr. Brian Walden: I have very little to say about new Clause 70. The Clause was put down to the Bill as it emerged from Committee, which is a totally different Bill from that which we shall pass on Third Reading. I agree with much of what my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) said. If the Totalisator Board were to operate as a bookmaker per se it should do so under the conditions that apply to all private bookmakers. I doubt whether that situation will ever arise and I therefore see no purpose in wasting the time of the House. There is no point in my making a long speech about how undesirable it would be for a public body to be given a beneficial arrangement by the State over a private body when it is operating as a direct competitor. That is a speech which I am sure would have moved hon. Gentlemen opposite to tears but which regrettably will not now be made.

Mr. Carlisle: The new Clause moved by the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis) is similar to that moved in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr), which he was good enough to withdraw when I undertook to look again at the matter. I have looked at it again, and I must advise the House that I do not think that a new Clause in the terms


suggested either by the hon. Member for West Ham, North, or by the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) would be desirable in statutory form.
To take up the point made by the hon. Member for All Saints, I must make clear that, subject to Amendments that are to come, there is nothing in the Bill to prevent the Totalisator Board from going into the fixed odds market, into the starting price market, running a book or going into the off-course market. The purpose of an Amendment which I shall shortly be moving, and which has been anticipated by the hon. Gentleman, is merely to put a commencing Clause on the advantages that might have been granted to the tote in achieving that end. It is a matter for the commercial judgment of the board. The Bill will permit it to go into fixed odds and starting price betting both on-course or off-course.
The purpose of the Clause, as I understand it, is to say that if the board choose to take that course it should be assessed similarly for levy as a private bookmaker. The difficulty with the new Clause in this form is that the assessment for levy of the private bookmaker is highly complicated and depends on the category in which he finds himself, and this again depends on the proportion of income, whether it be credit betting, cash betting, on-course betting or off-course betting. It is unlikely that the Totalisator in its full functions would suitably fit into any of those categories.
I suggest that it is sensible and right that one cannot look at one portion of the Totalisator Board's potential income for levy purposes without taking into account its overall position. Liability for levy depends basically on the ability to pay of the totalisator or private bookmaker. If we look at the ability to pay of the totalisator, we must look at the overall turnover, whether it be from pool betting or fixed odds. I do not think it is appropriate statutorily to attempt to divide it and say, "On that you shall pay so much percentage of your turnover, irrespective of whether you are making a loss or a profit on the other part of your enterprise".
Having looked at the matter again, I do not consider the new Clause to be appropriate. It is, nevertheless, accepted that one of the principles of that assess-

ment of the tote should be that the tote should not be in a position in which it can conduct fixed odds business on terms which, because of its separate levy position, favour it in comparison with other bookmakers. The Government intend that the Levy Board should not use its power to achieve that situation.
In all assessments made by the Levy Board it has, for understandable reasons, always assessed a higher proportion of the proportion of totalisator for levy as a non-profit making body than it has in regard to a private bookmaker. The fact is that the tote is a non-profit making body and the surplus will go back into racing. Implementation of the principle that the tote should not be in a favourable position because of its separate levy contributions calls for a sophisticated procedure which must take into account all the various factors on which an assessment is based. Therefore, I ask the House to reject the new Clause.

Question put and negatived.

New Clause 71

DEFINITION OF BOOKMAKER

Section 55(1) of the Act of 1963 shall be read and have effect as if in the definition of "bookmaker" the words "other than the Totalisator Board" were omitted.—[Mr. Brian Walden.]

Brought up and read the First time.

Mr. Brian Walden: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
I shall not take very long, but I wish to take up a comment made by the Minister which gives the House some indication why I thought that something like this new Clause would be desirable.
The Minister rightly said that nothing we are doing on Report, on the presumption that we pass the Bill, prevents the Totalisator Board from going into the off-course market if it wishes. Lest it be felt by those who report our affairs that that means that the Minister and I understand these matters differently, perhaps I could say that I am sure that we are wholly in accord.
The Minister says that there is nothing in the Bill by means of which the Government can interfere in the commercial judgment of the tote. I quite agree. I


am saying that I am certain that the commercial judgment of the tote now will be not to go into the SP market. I have too much confidence in Lord Mancroft to believe that he would be so stupid. If the tote goes into the SP market and has to raise all the capital necessary to do that it will throw away a very substantial sum that it is now hoped to get without any effort or endeavour on its part.
I agree with the Minister, and I do not want anyone to think that in what I said I was implying that we were passing a Bill which prevented the Tote Board from going into the SP market if it wanted to. I am sure that it will not. However, before I realised that I could afford to be as sure as I am now, it occurred to me that if the Totalisator Board were to operate as an SP book-maker it had as a matter of equity to be subjected to the same terms and conditions as those to which commercial bookmakers are subjected.
I regard new Clause 71 as probably redundant now. However, its then reasonable purpose was to alter the definition of "bookmaker" in the 1963 Act so that the Tote Board should not receive an exclusion.
I do not imagine that the Minister will accept the Clause. However one of the good things about what we are doing this evening is that we are moving away from the nonsense of having a Tote Board which is not a Tote Board, of having a Tote Board which is also an SP bookmaker, and having a Tote Board which is very difficult to categorise in betting. New Clause 71 was an attempt to say that anyone who operated in the SP market was a bookmaker and therefore was not entitled to any concessions given to a quasi-public body operating in pool betting.
I am delighted to think that the practicalities of the present situation are such that it is almost certain that these difficulties will not arise. However I put it to the Minister that the theoretical difficulty does arise in the way in which we are passing the Bill. If the Tote Board is to operate as a bookmaker off-course, I claim that it has no right to any consideration which would apply if it were solely a pool betting agency—

Mr. Rees-Davies: There is one important point. The hon. Gentleman is stressing "off-course": that is to say it should be equally between the bookmakers and the totalisator if the totalisator ventures off-course. But on-course it may wish to have SP arrangements in this new scheme being evolved. I take it that he is excluding that possibility from the operation of what he is saying.

Mr. Walden: That is an important point. It was my intention to deal with it on Third Reading, but perhaps I had beter take it up at once.
It has always been the view of the National Association of Bookmakers that it ran SP shops on-course simply for the convenience of punters and to prevent individual firms from running shops on-course. The NAB always has been naturally sensitive to the needs of on-course bookmakers, and the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies) knows how on-course shops, if made very attractive at SP odds, could seriously damage the on-course market. Rather than have competition arise between individual firms, the National Association of Bookmakers, as the National Association, has run those shops on-course. It has never been unwilling to discuss with the Tote Board the possibility that it would run those shops and give the profit from them to the Totalisator Board.
10.30 p.m.
I have only this objection to the board running its own shops. It is a personal objection. It does not necessarily reflect the views of anyone other than myself. I do not think that giving the board the power to run SP shops on race courses will have desirable results. What are these places to be? Are they to be what I would call stand palaces—magnificently lush places where one can sit, drink and bet at SP? If they are, a most serious effect will then be felt by the on-the-rails bookmaker. I would not want the board to do anything like that, though I personally would not have the slightest objection to the board either receiving the profit from the NAB shops or running similar facilities itself.
What I fear is an attempt to produce a pari-mutuel situation, a situation in which the board is taking more and more of the money which is being bet on-course.I object to that, not only


because it enormously affects the profits of bookmakers off-course, but because it ruins the whole starting price business. Once a meaningful starting price cannot be declared, the whole of racing will suffer.
It can be argued that no such situation would ever arise. I would accept that. It is most unlikely that any body chaired by Lord Mancroft would ever be so foolish as to spend a lot of money establishing places to pick up a certain amount of money from the on-course market which it knew would ruin the on-course market for the bookmaker and mean that Sporting Life and Sporting Chronicle could not declare a reasonable starting price. I cannot believe that it will happen. Nevertheless, as we are discussing what might happen, and as the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet asked me a fair question, I have answered him in some detail.
I revert to my main point. If we are discussing a Bill which gives at least the theoretical chance of the board operating as an SP bookmaker, I hope that the Minister will agree with me that even if the new Clause is not the way he would find to do it, there must be at some stage clear guidance from the House that the board cannot expect to be both a quasipublic body operating as a pool betting agency and receiving preferential treatment in that sense and at the same time operating in effect as an SP bookmaker off-course, and that this would make no sense, that it would be inequitable, and that the House would have to do something about it.

Mr. Carlisle: I can only repeat to the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) that, if the Totalisator Board chooses to go into the off-course starting price market, it must be a matter for its own commercial judgment, if it considers that that is in its interests to enable it to remain viable for the purpose of running an alternative method of betting available to the public.
The hon. Gentleman says that, if the board does this, it should be under all the same constraints as a bookmaker and that for that purpose the words
other than the Totalisator Board
should be removed from the definition of "bookmaker" in the 1963 Act. This

is unacceptable. Certain minor consequences would follow, one being that the board would be required to apply for a bookmaker's permit, which would be unnecessary and undesirable. I suspect that what the hon. Gentleman has in mind, and this is a more serious objection, is that if the board goes into the off-course market as a bookmaker, in that it is taking and negotiating bets, it should be subject to similar contributions to the levy as a private bookmaker. It therefore gives me the opportunity to say that I failed to say in reply to the previous debate, which is that the Totalisator Board is specifically excluded from the definition of a bookmaker. So long as it is carrying on pool betting it is not liable to similar contributions to the levy as the bookmaker. Because the bets are being taken by the Totalisator Board, if it offers to accept bets at tote prices it is not subject to the levy, although a bookmaker who accepts bets at Tote prices is.
On the other hand, its only reason for being excluded from the normal levy scheme for the bookmakers, if it chooses to accept ordinary fixed odd or starting price bets, is on the basis that the contribution to the levy is payable by a bookmaker acting on his own account. In other words, should the totalisator Board enter into the off-course market on its own account and accept fixed odds bets, it would not for that reason become subject to levy payments, but if it should go into the starting price market by means either of setting up a subsidiary company for that purpose, or, in negotiation with one or more bookmakers, creating a company for that purpose, then it would not be taking bets on its own account and that subsidiary company would therefore be a bookmaker within the definition of bookmaker in the 1963 Act and therefore would be liable for a similar contribution to the levy as that paid by the present private bookmaker.
I make that point because one of the hon. Gentleman's concerns is that the board might find it in its commercial interest to enter into negotiation with a particular individual private bookmaker, set up a subsidiary company for that purpose, and be able to use statutory advantages in the interests of that subsidiary company and through that subsidiary company, the firm of bookmakers


with which it had carried out the negotiation.
I want to point out to the hon. Gentleman that, as I understand the legal position, should the board enter into such an arrangement with an individual book-maker and set up a subsidiary company for that purpose, and the subsidiary company accepts bets at fixed odds or at tote prices, that company would be deemed in law to be a bookmaker and would not enjoy any advantage as against any other bookmaker nor, if other Amendments yet to be debated are accepted, would there be any statutory advantage as a result of the Bill.
The hon. Gentleman can be assured that much of his real concern is met, and he may think it is to his advantage to remember that it means that if the board as such, although going into the off-course market, wishes to have the advantage of being separately assessed for levy, it will have to retain its off-course interests itself; because if it once enters into a connection with an individual bookmaker and creates a subsidiary company for that purpose it will have no advantage of separate assessment as the Totalisator Board. It will be assessed in the same way as any other bookmaker.

Mr. Brian Walden: With the permission of the House, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I should like to say that the Minister of State has given a very valuable assurance. It is not that I have not had guidance from him on previous occasions, but he has now made clear what he believes to be the legal position in this respect.
In view of his assurance I wish to make one comment before seeking to withdraw the Clause. I still do not accept that if the Totalisator Board were to establish a private firm of bookmakers as its agents in the off-course market, no advantage would accrue to that firm of bookmakers. If the necessary parts of the Bill were activated the bookmakers would receive preferential treatment in the allocation of sites. But that is quite a way from what we are discussing on the Clause and I am satisfied with the Minister's assurances. I am grateful for the way in which he has given them. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion and Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 1

NEW CORPORATE POWERS FOR TOTALISATOR BOARD

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I beg to move Amendment No. 27, in page 2, line 32, at end insert:
(6) In section 16(1) of the Act of 1963 for paragraph (c) there shall be substituted the following paragraph:—
(c) for effecting betting transactions with persons resorting to the track or with a bookmaker or the Horserace Totalisator Board on dog races run on that track on that day".'

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu): With this Amendment we are to take the following Amendments:
No. 28, in page 2, line 32, at end insert:
'In section 16(1) of the Act of 1963, at end insert "and the accountant appointed by the licensing authority under paragraph 7 of the said Schedule may examine or cause to be examined all or any of the accounts of the totalisator with respect to credit betting by a bookmaker or the Horserace Totalisator Board under paragraph (c) of this sub. section "'.
No. 29, in page 2, line 32, at end insert:
(7) In section 16 after subsection (1) insert the following subsection (2)A:—
(2)A.—(1) Regulations may be made by the Secretary of State with respect to the duties of the accountant and the manner in which all accounts shall be kept with regard to credit betting.
(2) The power to make regulations conferred by this section shall include a power to vary or revoke the regulations by subsequent regulations and shall be exerciseable by statutory instrument 
No. 31, in page 2, line 32, at end insert:
(6) In section 16(1) of the Act of 1963 for paragraph (c) there shall be substituted the following paragraph—
'(c) for effecting betting transactions with persons resorting to the track or the Horse-race Totalisator Board on dog races run on that track on that day
No. 32, in page 2, line 32, at end insert:
'In section 16(1) of the Act of 1963, at end insert "and the accountant appointed by the licensing authority under paragraph 7 of the said Schedule may examine or cause to be examined all or any of the accounts of the totalisator with respect to credit betting by the Horserace Totalisator Board under paragraph (c) of this subsection".

Mr. Lewis: At one time I should have had an interest to declare in that the West Ham greyhound track was in my constituency, but it is no longer there and that is an interest I am not therefore obliged to disclose.
In the course of the Bill we have heard much discussion in favour of the great sport of horse racing. We have heard about the poor race horse owners, about how they are struggling to make ends meet, and how the Horserace Totalisator Board and the Horserace Betting Levy Board must come to their aid. The Amendments are designed to give equal treatment to greyhound racing to those given to horse racing and to see that the Totalisator Board is treated in the same way and on the same basis as the tote boards at greyhound tracks.
Greyhound racing is more of a working man's sport. One does not hear of great lords and ladies owning greyhounds. I pay a tribute to the efficient and admirable way in which the greyhound racing industry is organised. I refer to the legitimate side of the sport and not to what I believe are called the "flapping tracks", which are not responsible to anyone. I say nothing in their favour or against them because I do not know much about them. The Greyhound Racing Club is a reputable organisation and it has done a great deal to clean up the sport since the early days 40 or 50 years ago, and to make it an entertaining sport which is followed by many ordinary working class people.
I hope that the Minister, if he is unable to accept the Amendments, will give an assurance that the very friendly and happy relationship that he seems to have with the Horserace Betting Levy Board, the Horse-race Totalisator Board and with all connected with the horse racing industry, including the trainers, the jockeys and the owners, will be extended to greyhound racing. One of my objections to the Bill has been that we seem to fall over ourselves to support horse racing while nothing is done for greyhound racing. Will the Minister meet representatives of greyhound racing to try to reach an arrangement with them if he cannot accept the Amendments?

10.45 p.m.

Mr. Rees-Davies: I must answer the hon. Gentleman's last observation. Dog

racing has been treated as well as horse racing and even rather better. I was responsible for putting through an unamended Bill which gave dog tracks the right to add days if any days were lost to dog racing, which allowed a number of further days and which increased their returns to 12½ per cent. It is not fair to say that dog racing and horse racing have not been treated absolutely equitably.

Mr. Lewis: I appreciate that the hon. Member has been interested in dog racing for many years, as I have. He rightly says that dog tracks have been allowed to make up lost days and have been allowed 12½ per cent. for administrative costs not only to make up for losses over the last few years but to meet the depreciation of the £. But no restrictions such as a number of days have been applied to horse racing. Greyhound tracks still have the number of their permitted days limited. Horse racing does not suffer similar restrictions.

Mr. Rees-Davies: This is a lengthy and technical argument. Dog racing has as many days as it can conveniently operate. Horse racing has a limited number of days, depending on what the track will operate. Comparing the two is a highly technical argument not suitable for this occasion.
I moved similar Amendments in Committee because I believed that they were essential as the Bill stood. They were proposed against the background of a Bill that at that time was a Totalisator Bill, a Bill that would result in some form of inequitable treatment.
The Horserace Totalisator Board is a non-profit-making concern in the ordinary sense of the expression, that is, it is set up as a public body to make a profit which is ploughed back into the benefit of horse racing. The Totalisator Board for greyhound racing is an entirely profit-making operation for those operating the tote. That is the difference.
In Committee we were seeking by these Amendments to enable the bookmaker off the course and the Tote off the course to lay off bets on the course. That was a reasonable proposal. We were seeking to increase the revenue of the Horserace Totalisator Board. The difficulty tonight has arisen because it is not a Totalisator Bill for greyhound racing although it is


a Horserace Totalisator Bill. The principle that we enunciated was that all money taken off-course or on-course should go to the benefit of the totalisator on course. I am not sure that this is now a Bill for that purpose.
My hon. and learned Friend has been good enough to indicate to the industry and to me his feelings about the matter following his clear and specific undertaking in Committee that he would give careful consideration to it. He has done so, and has encountered a difficulty. On the greyhound track the punter can bet with the tote or the bookmaker, and off the course he can accept either of those prices. But what cannot be done is to ensure that all the money the punter has paid off course shall be brought on to the course.
There are two ways in which the greyhound racing industry can be saved. One is to get the people to come back on to the course. I think that that is the right method, and that the right way to do it is through the Finance Bill. Considerable assistance has been given by reducing the differential on-course for the greyhound racing industry by bringing it down to 4 per cent. on-course. This will help it a great deal. If it had been brought down 1 per cent. to 3 per cent., that would have helped it a great deal more, and would probably have achieved what the industry needs. The other way is to try to get all the off-course money on the greyhounds treated as if it were on-course. But that is a very important principle, and to deal with it in a Bill which is not a "dog" Bill but is a Totalisator Bill for the horses is asking rather a lot of the House. I hope that next year the Treasury will be prepared to go a little further and give the final advantage which is necessary.
For a long time the greyhound racing industry has carried a substantial tax burden, which should be reduced. If it is not done in that way, I hope that it will be done in another way, because it is still an industry with a great many followers. I do not think that it is a lame duck. I think that its followers are prepared to pay a substantial tax. The tax is still too high, but I incline to the view that it would be better to change it by way of a Treasury Amendment in due

course rather than by pressing the Amendments tonight.

Mr. Albert Roberts: I support my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis), and I accept some of the points raised by the hon. Member for Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies). Whether we are dealing with horse racing or not, the matters involved are all tied up together, because the Bill will give certain powers to the Totalisator Board which could affect greyhound racing to some extent.
I agree with my hon. Friend about the clean, efficient sport and how well it is conducted. I would sooner attend a greyhound meeting than a horse racing meeting at any time. There is better service and comfort, and it is over in two hours and so does not involve extended betting.
We must bear in mind that greyhound racing has suffered from off-course betting quite a deal. It must maintain its facilities, and if he wants to see a high standard maintained the Minister must be interested particularly in my hon. Friend's Amendments. I hope that he will approach them in the same spirit as he approached our Committee proceedings, when we all tried to solicit support and be co-operative. I thought that he gave me a wonderful assurance about the off-course betting then, but I understand that he will not be too forthcoming tonight. However, I hope that he will give us a primose that will give us some hope for the future, because if greyhound racing is to keep up the standard of its facilities it must be protected to some extent.
No one can say that greyhound racing is prosperous. It has carried the load for a long time. The hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet says that perhaps the tote does more for greyhound racing than for horse racing, and I agree. After the war, Sir Stafford Cripps to some extent penalised greyhound racing in order to soak up money but now greyhound racing is going through difficult times and it is expecting more favourable consideration from the powers-that-be. I hope that the Minister of State, if he cannot go the whole way on this Amendment, will at least go some way.

Mr. Carlisle: The Amendment is similar to one moved in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle


of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies). I said then that I would consider what had been said, but held out no hope that it was likely that the Government would be able to accept the principle.
It was argued in Committee that attendances at greyhound racing had dropped and in particular that as a result the amount of money being placed with the totalisator on the course had dropped and there was therefore a weak on-course market. It was further argued that whereas the bookmakers and, under the Bill, the Totalisator Board, were able to take bets at greyhound totalisator odds, and while they could if they wished use an on-course representative to place a cash bet with the track totalisator, they could not transmit off-course bets they received direct to the track totalisator, and that if they could do so it was likely to strengthen the on-course market.
I have considered the arguments but I must point out the comment of my hon. Friend the Member for the Isle of Thanet when he says that since the Committee we have had a change in the betting duty rate in the Budget, which, by reducing the betting tax on the on-course market, will in itself have the effect in part of strengthening that market. Secondly, as my hon. Friend also said, the Government have not been unreasonable or unmindful of the plight of greyhound racing expressed by the greyhound racing fraternity. We have supported a private Bill introduced for the purpose of increasing the number of permitted days and have allowed the deductions from the totalisator for greyhound racing to be increased from 6 to l2½per cent. The strength of the arguments in Committee has therefore weakened to a degree in the meantime.
My second argument in Committee was that I conceded in principle that there appeared to be little difference in allowing the bookmaker to place money on the track totalisator if he happened to be on the course, and ringing it through from his office by means of credit.
11.0 p.m.
On reflection I must say that I believe that to have that situation would make major inroads of principle into the basis on which betting on greyhound racing takes place. The dog track totalisators are entitled to accept only bets paid in cash

on the course. The inevitable consequence of accepting these Amendments would be that dog track totalisators would be able to accept credit betting from the Horse-race Totalisator or bookmakers off-course. It would be difficult, if we accepted that breach of principle, to stand up against the demand that might shortly follow, that if we can accept credit betting on the dogs from the bookmaker why cannot we receive telephoned-in credit bets from the individual?
The effect of that would be that whereas greyhound racing takes place in the evening and the fact that the betting shops are not open then in itself limits the volume of betting on greyhound racing, if there were the power, despite the fact that betting shops were not open, for individual members of the public to telephone in and bet on credit on the dogs in the evening as they sat in comfort by their fireside or drinking a pint of beer in their local, there could be the risk of an upsurge in the volume of betting on greyhound racing which I do not believe any of us would in principle, for social reasons, desire.
I do not think that there is any advantage in these Amendments but they could open the way to a much greater volume of betting on the dogs than exists and I do not think that we wish to be seen supporting measures which could lead to a far greater volume of such betting. For those reasons I must tell the hon. Gentleman that on reflection I cannot accept the Amendment.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: By leave of the House. May I thank the Minister for the courteous way in which he replied? Can I get the record straight? I am sure that he did not mean to put it this way but when he refers, as did the hon. Member for the Isle of Thanet (Mr. Rees-Davies), to the addition of up to 12½per cent. for administrative costs, it is only fair to point out that this is what could be called arrears of compensation for the depreciation of the £under both Governments over many years, and the exceptionally high cost of administration. I have not my figures with me but I think it was 20 years or more. It is not being given anything; it is just catching up with arrears.
The other point is that I do not believe that this is a question of increasing betting and making greyhound racing a social


evil. This would only he a transfer. At the moment the greyhound tracks are open for limited periods of two hours during the afternoon or evening. The tote on the greyhound track is limited to money going in on the track in those two hours whereas the Totalisator Board can and does draw in money from the whole of the day and night up to the closing of the betting shops. Therefore it is milking it from the track. If I want to put on a bet at a greyhound track but cannot get there because I am at the House, there is nothing to stop me going along to the Totalisator Board and putting it on there.
Will the Minister discuss with the industry the possibility of totalisator offices on the tracks being open to receive bets during off-peak periods and not when the tracks were operating, so that they could compete on equal terms with the Totalisator Board and the outside bookmakers? It may not be possible to do it on credit, although I do not see why, but it might be possible to devise a system under which bets could be taken to the tracks or, as in football pools, sent in by post. That would give greyhourd tracks the opportunity of getting some of the money that now goes to the Totalisator Board or outside bookmakers, and it would help to increase attendance at dog tracks.
I beg to ask leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Clause 3

APPLICATIONS BY TOTALISATOR BOARD FOR BETTING OFFICE LICENCE

Mr. Carlisle: I beg to move Amendment No. 53, in page 3, line 14, after 'licence', insert:
'or to any application for the grant of such a licence by way of transfer of one that is in force for the same premises at the time of the application;'.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: With this Amendment we are to take Government Amendment No. 54, and Amendment No. 58, in page 3, line17, at end insert:
'(3) In any case in which after the passing of this Act a betting office licence has been granted to the Totalisator Board in respect of any premises it shall not be competent for the Board to object to the application by the widow of a bookmaker or by any son or

daughter of a deceased bookmaker for the grant of a betting office licence in respect of any premises in the same locality in respect of which such bookmaker held a betting office licence at the time of his death on the ground that the grant would be inexpedient having regard to the demand in the locality and the number of betting offices already available'.

Mr. Carlisle: The Government Amendments, Nos. 53 and 54, have the same purpose as Amendment No. 58, although they are in slightly wider terms. They deal with the question of the transfer of an existing licence of premises. The House will remember that in Committee I moved an Amendment to Clause 3 the effect of which would be to provide that in future the demand provision should not apply to the renewal of an existing licence, so that the renewal of an existing bookmaker's licence could not be objected to on the basis of lack of demand.
The effect of the Amendments would be that applications for the transfer of existing licences to another individual should not be opposed on the basis of lack of demand either. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr) who, although silent this evening, is the author of two of the Amendments that I have nut down. He certainly caused me to look at these points again. I believe that the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) also raised this point in Committee. In terms, it was felt that if a licence holder died it was wrong that that person's widow, widower, son, or daughter should be prevented from taking over the premises on the basis of a lack of demand.
The Government decided that they would go slightly wider. If the same demand exists as existed when the original licence was granted, it is unnecessary to retain the demand provision on the transfer of the licence. If trade has fallen in the area so that there is no further demand for the licence, the normal commercial rules will take account of that situation. On the normal type of transfer, it being assumed that there was a demand on the basis of which the licence was originally granted, it seems unnecessary, merely because there is a transfer of the licence to another name, for that demand to be proved again.
If Amendment No. 55 is passed by the House, the whole of this provision will


become subject to a commencement order. But I was specifically pressed to bring in these Amendments due to the fear that the demand provision might work unfairly if the Tote were able to go into the market due to a statutory advantage provided for it by Clause 3. Therefore, it seems reasonable that the added protections which were introduced to meet that criticism should be tied to Clause 3 so that if it became necessary to implement Clause 3 these added protections on transfers and on renewals should also be implemented.

Mr. Brian Walden: There is no point in my moving Amendment No. 58 in view of the more comprehensive Amendment and guarantee of the Minister. I thank the Minister. He is right in indicating that the hon. Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr) and myself were concerned about this point which seemed to us to he one of equity. The hon. and learned Gentleman has gone into it and has rectified it. I think that his Amendment is better than mine. Therefore, if the House finds his Amendment acceptable, I would not wish mine to be moved.

Mr. John Farr: I hope that the Minister of State will not think that my silence up to now has been due to a lack of interest or attention. One could describe my attitude as being one of full of silent admiration for the splendid work which my hon. and learned Friend is performing. Some of the Amendments he has tabled are absolutely admirable, particularly this Amendment. As he said, it is the result of, not only Committee stage points, but of correspondence between us.
I thank my hon. and learned Friend for the careful way in which he has considered the point, as he has considered others. I hope that the safeguards which the Amendment writes into Clause 3 will never be applied because I hope that Clause 3 will never come into operation. Nevertheless, I am very grateful to my hon. and learned Friend for what he has done.

Amendment agreed to.

Amendment made: No. 54, in page 3. line 17, at end insert:
'nor applying for the grant of a licence by way of transfer of one that is in force for the same premises at the time of the application)" '.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

Mr. Carlisle: I beg to move Amendment No. 55, in page 3, line 17, at end insert:
'(3) This section shall not come into force unless and until the Secretary of State so directs by order made by statutory instrument of which a draft has been laid before Parliament'.
I suppose that it is arguable whether this Amendment or the Amendments which I moved on new Clause 1 represent the major change to the Bill, but all are clearly important and I concede to the hon. Member for Accrington (Mr. Arthur Davidson) that they change considerably the effect of the Bill.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet (Mr. Maudling), then the Home Secretary, made it clear throughout that the Government would always be willing to look again at Clause 3. We did so in Committee and we amended it there. I made it clear in Committee that I was still willing to consider further amendment of the Clause by the imposition of a commencement order which would not bring the Clause into being when the rest of the Bill came into effect. I believe that by this Amendment I have wholly carried out the undertaking which my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet gave on Second Reading and which I gave in Committee.
11.15 p.m.
The purpose of Clause 3 was and has always been to enable the Totalisator Board, should it wish, to enter on its own account into the off-course market where in practice a closed shop situation had substantially arisen, and where it would be likely, unless it were given some advantage, that every application which it made would be blocked on the basis that the demand in the area was adequately met by the facilities which already existed. I have always made it quite clear that the only purpose of Clause 3 was to enable the Totalisator Board to enter into that market. I have equally made it clear that if I felt in the future that the viability of the Totalisator could be adequately met without recourse to Clause 3 I would welcome holding the Clause in abeyance.
For various reasons which, at this hour of night, I need not go into, I believe that the Totalisator's future viability can be met without the use of Clause 3. I believe that for two reasons. First of


all as is openly known, and as the hon. Gentleman has said, the Totalisator Board has carried out and is carrying out, various discussions with bookmaking interests; that may mean that it would not wish to use Clause 3.
Alternatively, I think it must be made clear, that if the Totalisator Board, as it would be free to do, choose to enter into the off-course market by negotiation with one or more bookmakers on some form of agency agreement, it would be wrong that there should be in the Bill a Clause which would provide for the board in that situation a statutory advantage over those with whom it would be competing.
I have always accepted the force of both those arguments. Therefore, I have always accepted that I would amend the Clause were it possible to do so.
The advantage of the commencement provision in the proposed new subsection is that it makes clear—I say this advisedly —that if in fact the Totalisator Board advises the Home Secretary at a later stage that despite its efforts it is unable to enter into any agreement of whatever kind to ensure its viable future, and that, to ensure that, it is necessary to enter the market on its own, and it cannot do so without this statutory advantage in entering this market, the Home Secretary of the day may make an order—and I am sure my right hon. Friend in these circumstances would lay such an order—which would implement Clause 3. Of course, if the Totalisator Board is satisfied that it can have a viable future without the Clause there would be no intention of implementing the Clause.
I say again to my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough that he was the first on the Notice Paper about this subject. There is a slight difference between the wording of his Amendment of that of mine. His would make the order effective at the moment of its being laid, although the order would be subject to amendment; but my Amendment goes further, because by it the order would have to be laid first and would not go into effect till it had been laid the requisite number of days, during which time it would be subject to annulment, before coming into force.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I do not wish to oppose the Minister's Amendment but I want to say a word in favour of sub-Amendments which I have put down. I hoped the Prime Minister might be here tonight to support my sub-Amendments. He coined the famous phrase "with the full-hearted consent of the people" and my sub-Amendments give the Minister the opportunity to carry out the wishes of the Prime Minister.
I am suggesting by my sub-Amendments that the Bill should not come into effect until June, 1975, or after the next General Election. Neither the Conservative Party nor the Labour Party promised at the last election to introduce this Bill. There has been no demonstration by the dockers, engineers, bricklayers or carpenters demanding the Bill. I cannot, therefore, see why we should not stand it over until after the next General Election or June, 1975, whichever is the sooner.
I am concerned about the expedition shown by the Government in helping people who do not need help as much as do the old-age pensioners, the sick and the disabled—

Mr. Carlisle: We are the first Government to bring in a constant attendance allowance for the severely disabled, the first Government to bring in additional help for the chronically sick and the first Government to provide for an annual rather than a two-yearly review of pensions.

Mr. Lewis: I am much obliged to the hon. and learned Gentleman for giving me the help I always get from him. All these were in the Conservative Party's manifesto, but there was no mention in it of a Horserace Totalisator and Betting Levy Boards Bill. There were also promises to cut prices at a stroke and to reduce the cost of living. That has not been done. A consumer protection Bill has not been introduced.
My sub-Amendments give the Government the opportunity of proving that they take notice of what the people want. My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Wythenshawe (Mr. Alfred Morris) introduced the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Bill, with help from the Government. I am not attacking the Government—

Mr. Arthur Davidson: The Labour Government introduced the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Bill.

Mr. Lewis: My hon. Friend is right in saying that the Labour Government deserve credit for it. I do not want to get involved in party politics on this matter. I feel that we should say that this should come into effect only after a general election, whenever that will be. All the Minister will have to do is to say to the Prime Minister, "I wish to activate these provisions and the only way to do so is to have a General Election. Therefore, we must have a General Election quickly." We on this side would welcome a General Election now rather than to have to wait until 1975.
I regard these Amendments as helpful to the Minister since they give him the freedom to consult the people and to get their full-hearted consent. Of course, the only doubt it will throw over the situation is that the Conservatives may not get back in again, although I should like to see the hon. and learned Member for Runcorn (Mr. Carlisle) come back to the House. But his Government certainly may not get back. The electorate would at least have the opportunity to pass an opinion on the Bill.
The present Government persistently oppose the will of the people. They have done so over the Industrial Relations Bill, in which they did not consult the trade unions or get their agreement, and they have done so on the European Communities Bill. However, they consulted the Totalisator Board and the horse racing industry before they introduced this Bill. They rushed the Bill through and nobody knew anything about it. We are now going into the Common Market against the wishes of the people—

11.30 p.m.

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. E. L. Mallalieu): Order. I think the hon. Gentleman is straying a little far from the Amendments. I hope he will return to them.

Mr. Lewis: I am trying to be helpful to the Minister and I am sure he wants to have the full-hearted consent of the people.
My two sub-Amendments may appear to be small and insignificant. Hon. Members opposite may think that they

have only a limited effect. However, they would give the Minister the chance to carry out the Prime Minister's wish about getting the full-hearted consent of the electorate to all these other issues. These are very important sub-Amendments. I am very interested in discovering the wishes of the electorate. We might see then whether it was felt that prices had been cut at a stroke. We might see whether it was felt that enough had been done for the sick and the disabled. I hope that the Minister will regard one or other of my sub-Amendments as a very good addition to his Amendment, since they both provide him with a genuine opportunity to show that he believes in democratic government.
We are told that the dock workers should agree to ballots. I can assure the House that they do. The Government insisted on a ballot of the railway workers recently. They seem to have forgotten to insist on one for the dockers. I suggest that we have a ballot about this Bill. Obviously the Minister will not agree to a referendum about it. The Government would not agree to a referendum about the Common Market—

Mr. Michael Cocks: Before my hon. Friend becomes too optimistic, I remind him that this is the same Minister who piloted through this House the Bill to denationalise the State pubs and breweries in the teeth of the opposition of all the local inhabitants.

Mr. Lewis: I am very much obliged to my hon. Friend for that intervention. He has helped me greatly, as he always does. He has put forward another reason why the Minister should accept one or other of my sub-Amendments. The Minister would then have an opportunity to see whether the workers of Carlisle and the other areas where the State breweries were accepted another piece of legislation which was not in the Tory manifesto. My hon. Friend has reminded me that not only have this Government thwarted the will of the people and gone against the wishes of the people in those areas, not only have they gone against their election manifesto, but, it would appear, they are against accepting one or other of two simple Amendments which would give them the opportunity to go back to the electorate and say, "This shows how democratic and good we are. We


introduced a Bill which no one wanted except rich racehorse owners and which no one supported except those connected with betting. Nevertheless, we accepted an Amendment from that awful Member from West Ham, North, who is always making trouble, with the result that we are coming back to you before putting into force one of the main principles of the Bill."

Mr. Farr: I should like to say a word about my Amendment No. 57 which I understand has been selected for discussion. My Amendment proposes to add, at the end of line 17,
(3) This section shall come into operation on such day as the Secretary of State may appoint by order made by statutory instrument which shall be subject to amendment in pursuance of a resolution of either House of Parliament.
I thank my hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State for his Amendment. He said he was prepared to agree that I had been first in the field with my Amendment, which differs slightly from his. If my memory serves me, in Committee I was often first in the field with my Amendments and found my hon. and learned Friend singularly reluctant to follow me on any of them. I readily say how glad I am that he has followed me on this one, which is such a fundamental Amendment as to enable me to forgive him for not joining me on some of my other smaller Amendments in the past.
I fully agree with my hon. and learned Friend in what he has done. Although there are faults in Clause 3, which we are so to speak putting on ice, at least it has been put on ice. It will act as an encouragement to the bookmakers to get together with the tote to work out a satisfactory financial arrangement. I thank my hon. and learned Friend for being big enough to come to the House, in the light of the fresh evidence which has been given to him, to correct what was in the first place, as many of us suspected, a wrong in the Bill.

Mr. Norman Fowler: I, too, welcome the Amendment although not entirely from the point of view mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr).
It should be pointed out that there is now a significant gap in the arguments

used in favour of Clause 3 on Second Reading. In moving the Amendment, my hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State said that the one purpose of Clause 3 was to enable the tote to enter the betting shop sector. Now we hear that there may be agency agreements. Very well, let us accept that that will be the case.
It is fair to point out that Clause 3 also had a second purpose. It was considered to be a very important purpose; indeed, it was explained as being crucial. My hon. and learned Friend set it out concisely on Second Reading, when he said that
in considering the history of gaming legislation any Government must appreciate the potential danger if the whole of commercial gambling gets into a very few hands, without any form of adequate control. That is why the last Government felt it necessary to set up the Gaming Board. For gambling on horse racing we have never had, and have never been tempted to have, such control as exists in gaming. We have always relied on the competition provided by the tote with those in the private market."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 3rd February, 1972; Vol. 830, c. 792.]
It would now seem from what my hon. and learned Friend has said that the key word is no longer "competition" but is "co-operation". Certainly it is not competition in the way that it was envisaged in February.
I make no complaint that the Government have changed their view on a piece of gambling legislation. I cannot think of a piece of gambling legislation that has gone through this House during the last 10 years on which Governments have not changed their views. Certainly the gaming legislation proposals put forward by the former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Stechford (Mr. Roy Jenkins), when in opposition underwent radical change before the eventual Bill was produced.
One should examine what the effect of this change will be. Although I do not necessarily agree with it, I should like first to draw the attention of the House to a comment made today by the General Secretary of the Churches' Committee on Gambling Legislation, the Rev. Gordon Moody. It is fair to say that the Churches' Committee is about the only independent body reviewing gambling. Therefore, anything that that body says,


and anything said by the Rev. Gordon Moody, is something to which this House should at least pay attention.

Mr. Walden: I do not wish to attack in any way the Churches' Committee on Gambling, least of all the Rev. Gordon Moody, whom I have the pleasure of knowing, but its attitude to gambling is well-known: it wishes gambling to be diminished. Why should that be regarded as an independent point of view?

Mr. Fowler: I do not agree, though I take the hon. Gentleman's point. The point I was trying to make was that this is a body which makes independent reviews of the spread and extent of gambling. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman will disagree with that. I slightly disagree with the hon. Gentleman's statement that the Churches' Committee wants to restrain and diminish gambling as much as possible. That is not my impression of the current policy of the Churches' Committee. The current policy is to contain gambling within certain limits—that is the policy of both the previous Labour Government and this Conservative Government—but that those limits should be defined. My point is that the experience of the Churches' Committee over the last 10 years is probably unparalleled amongst bodies unconnected with the industry. Therefore, what the Churches' Committee says should at any rate be listened to in the House.
I repeat that I do not necessarily agree with the Reverend Gordon Moody, but it is fair to quote what he has said:
such an agreement
—the Reverend Gordon Moody is forecasting what my hon. and learned Friend would announce—
could give bookmakers a hold over the Board. If I were a bookmaker I think I would not want the Totalisator to die, so long as it remained a nice little thing, and I could pat it on the head and, while pretending to feed it, take a regular supply of titbits out of its mouth.
My hon. and learned Friend should address himself to that criticism of which he will have had notice and allay the fears of the Churches' Committee.
On Second Reading my hon. and learned Friend referred—I think rightly—to the competition between the tote, on the one side, and private bookmakers, on

the other, as introducing some kind of control mechanism into the gambling and racing industry. What is the position to be now? I have always been a supporter of extending the remit of the Gaming Board and having a gaming board of control. The previous Government made a great mistake in not doing that. There should be a gaming board of control having a remit over the whole of gambling. However, I might be out of order if I were to seek to go deeply into my proposals in that regard. There should be some control mechanism in gambling and in gaming as it affects racing.
I did not agree with the proposal made under Clause 3 which the Government put forward. It is now incumbent on the Government, having also agreed that they want some control mechanism, to say, now that their policy has shifted significantly from competition to co-operation, what exactly their proposal is. Do they think that the situation has changed since they made their proposals in February? What is their position on control or over-seeing of the betting industry?

11.45 p.m.

Mr. Walden: The Minister said that it was doubtful whether this Amendment or what was to be done in respect of Clause 6 was the most important thing under the Bill. I am disposed to agree with him about that, although what the hon. and learned Gentleman seeks to do by the Amendment will remove by far the most objectionable feature of the Bill as it came from Committee.
I want to try to allay some of the quite misplaced fears of the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler). It is not my job to speak for the Minister. He may console his hon. Friend as best he can. However, I think that the hon. Member for Nottingham, South is on a completely false point. The Minister and I once had a long argument upstairs about the use of the word "competition". If he now wishes to understand what it was that was worrying me, he has only to refer to the remarks of his hon. Friend who obviously does not understand what the situation was and will be, because the word competition has always been misused by the Government in presenting the Bill. The situation was and will be that the tote is a pool competitor of the bookmakers in this sense, that it runs


pool betting on horse racing and bookmakers run SP on-course and credit betting. Nothing will change because of the Minister's commencement order powers. Nothing will be different from what has been the situation ever since the board was set up.
What would have happened under the Bill is that the totalisator board would have been a competitor, in the sense that I understand that word, with private bookmakers by becoming one. The hon. Gentleman's fears about a monopoly in gambling and his worry about private bookmakers would not in the least be resolved by that situation, because he should know—and probably does know—that the Totalisator Board would not itself, as a board, have gone into the SP field. It would have made a deal with a private bookmaker. One of the big fish would have become a bigger fish by doing a deal with the tote and it would have operated with the tote in the SP market. In that sense, what worries the hon. Gentleman and what worries the Reverend Gordon Moody and the Churches' Committee on Gambling Legislation would have been magnified and not diminished.
If there is—and I think there is—a movement within the gambling industry which is tending to concentrate more and more betting in a few hands, I can only say that that mirrors the modern world. That is what is happening everywhere to everything. It may be deplorable but, first, it is not scandalous; secondly, it is not corrupt; thirdly, it does not seem to be any particular occasion for any Government to do anything about it.
If it became apparent that there were grave abuses by private bookmakers which were damaging the interests of racing and which were fraudulent towards the punter, of course the Government would have to do something about it, and the Home Office naturally keeps its eyes open to see whether anything of that kind occurs. A lot of discussion about the starting price and making sure that one got a valid starting price was occasioned wholly by the legitimate worries of both the Government and hon. Members that if the SP could be rigged that would be unfair to the ordinary punter. I understand what the hon. Gentleman is worried about and I understand, too, his well-placed concern, but

his fears are illusory, and in any case would not have been met by the retention of this Clause in the Bill without a commencement order.
I want to say a word about the Churches' Committee on Gambling Legislation. I do not want this to sound objectionable. I have a great respect for the Reverend Gordon Moody. I accept the committee's diligence and its attempts to find out what is going on. I accept that there can be no question of the committee being biased as between one bookmaker and another or one form of gambling and another, but one has to face the fact that it is like a fish out of water. I have never been persuaded that the committee really understands the motives that lead men to gamble. It constantly alleges that this is so that people can make large sums of money, and so on, or that it is a compulsive habit. That might be true in a very small number of cases, but the fact is that gambling, like drinking in moderation, and like many other activities which are better not discussed, happens to be an exceedingly pleasurable activity, and I do not think that it is the duty of a Government to go beyond seeing that it is not conducted in a disgraceful way and is not conducted in a way that leads to an unreasonable proliferation. That would be of concern to the Government.
But there is no question of that at the moment in terms of betting on horse races. All the great concern of the Churches' Committee is misplaced. Moreover, not only their instinct but also their information on the subject is often untrue. This is not a suitable opportunity for me to go into it in detail and the House would not wish me to do so. But I can cite from some of the more famous publications of that Committee where there has been error after error after error on page after page after page. That leads me to believe that the effort was diligent and certainly honest, but it was not particularly well informed.
The fears of the hon. Member for Nottingham, South are misplaced, but it will be for the Minister to reply to him. The sort of thing that he fears happening will not happen. The action of the Minister in putting a commencement on the Clause will change nothing from the situation as it exists. Nor is it the case —and this is where Rev. Gordon Moody


misunderstands the situation—that the tote has become the pensioner of the bookmakers and, to some extent, is under coercive pressure from them so that they can tell it what to do. As the Minister has said repeatedly, if at any stage the Totalisator Board says to him that it cannot make any sort of arrangement with the bookmakers that satisfies it, he can lay an order activating the Clause. The idea that the board will therefore be delivered bound hand and foot to the bookmakers and then told what to do by the bookmakers is quite wrong. That is to misunderstand all the discussions that have gone on and the arrangements that have been made.
The board will receive a substantial sum by using the bookmakers as agents with very little, if any, inconvenience to it and with lower administration charges. Yet it still holds all the cards. If it does not like what it gets, it can at any time go to the Minister and ask for the activation of the Clause by order.

Mr. Fowler: rose

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Robert Grant-Ferris): Order. We should not embark on too much discussion on this. In his enthusiasm the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) is going a little wide of the Amendment. He should now come back to it and the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler) should leave it.

Mr. Walden: I accept your ruling, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and so, I see, does the hon. Member for Nottingham, South.
I conclude by congratulating the Minister. What he has done is admirable. It makes sense and I wholly agree with his description of it. It is fair to bookmakers and it is fair to the Totalisator Board. If the board has any fears, or if it cannot make arrangements that ensure its permanent viability, the door has been left open for it to tell its problems to the Home Office. At the same time the Minister has honoured the guarantee given by the Home Secretary that if viability can be found in any other way the Government do not wish to activate the Clause in its original form.
As with the other substantial thing which the Minister did tonight in regard to Clause 6, he has done entirely the

right thing and in entirely the right way, and I approve the Amendment.

Mr. Arthur Davidson: My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) is a most persuasive advocate, but I think that he was less than fair to the Churches' Committee on Gambling Legislation. It is easy to say that its members are misinformed and are fish out of water, but every one of us is relatively a fish out of water on the subject of betting and gaming.

Mr. Walden: That is all the more reason for our making as few regulations about it as possible.

Mr. Davidson: It is not. My hon. Friend is wrong once again, even though he puts it with great force, because gaming leads to certain abuses. It is unfortunate, but it happens, and the House must be constantly concerned about the social implications of gaming, but this is not the occasion for me to expand on that theme.
The Minister rightly said that this was an important Amendment. Its effect is to delay the operation of the most important Clause in the Bill. I have had a fair amount of fun at the Minister's expense and I do not want to go over that ground again. The Minister rightly said that the then Home Secretary had made it clear, and the Minister himself made it clear throughout the Committee stage, that the Clause was to be regarded as a last resort Clause. It has plainly caused the House much concern. I have always thought that it was necessary and I still think that it may be necessary for the Minister to activate the Clause if the tote is to become viable, as is the purpose of the Bill.
I do not want to cover the ground my hon. Friend introduced, especially as he elevated me to the deputy deputy leadership of the Opposition, but I should like to ask the Minister one or two questions. He will recall that I was not only present in the Committee but supported him when he cogently explained why he could not accept the proposal advanced by the hon. Member for Harborough (Mr. Farr). I think that he owes me an explanation why he now finds it possible to accede to that request.
Does he envisage the Totalisator Board buying its way into SP shops by


buying existing betting shops? Has he any knowledge whether that is being envisaged? Once Clause 3 is removed, there is little if any possibility of the board being able to open new shops, because it is obvious that the bookmakers would object strenuously to new shops being opened in their areas, and they would be entitled to object.
Has the Minister any knowledge of the hoard being more imaginative about the type of betting to be offered to the public? Will it operate the tiercé? Will it give much bigger pools for jackpot betting? Will it offer a much greater variety of combination betting?
I should like here to comment on what was said by the hon. Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler). The Churches' Committee understandably takes the view that it is far more in the public interest that there should be a greater variety of combination betting because the greater the return on a small outlay, the better socially, because the less the public will have to visit betting shops and remain in them. It is the aim of the Churches' Committee that people should spend as little time as possible in betting shops, for the committee takes the view that it is socially harmful for people to remain in betting shops—for a whole host of obvious reasons. A combination bet is a once-and-for-all bet. It can be placed in the morning, and, if the punter is lucky enough, the dividend can be collected late at night. The punter does not have to keep on betting from race to race.
There is much in what the hon. Member for Nottingham, South said. It would be disastrous for the tote if an arrangement, an agency agreement or some other agreement with bookmakers, restricted the freedom of the tote in some way.
I understand why the Minister has, even at this late hour, decided it would be better to postpone the operation of the Clause. I do not criticise him for doing it. It would have been better if he had done it earlier. However, he has done it, and it would be churlish of those who made certain criticisms of the Clause, who pointed out the dangers and how it would be offensive to bookmakers, to oppose the Amendment now.

12 midnight.

Mr. Carlisle: The Government always looked upon the Clause as a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The end is the provision of a viable tote, enabling it to provide the public with an alternative method of betting.
I shall not get involved in the arguments over semantics in which I was involved with the hon. Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) in Committee. But I tell my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, South (Mr. Fowler), as I told the hon. Gentleman then, that I cannot see the basic difference between providing an alternative service and being in competition. The tote provides competition to the bookmaker by providing an alternative method of betting, assessed mathematically, and the punter can decide whether he chooses to bet with the pool betting provided by the tote or bet on the board prices or starting prices offered by the bookmaker. The purpose of the Bill was to ensure the continuance of a viable tote, providing an alternative method of betting to the public.
The purpose of Clause 1, to enable it to provide a full alternative service, was to widen its powers, including entry into starting price betting. Clause 3 was a means to enable it to go into the off-course market. The Government always said that if they were satisfied that that end of viability could be achieved without the means of the Clause they would consider putting the Clause into cold storage. I am satisfied that as at this moment the chances are that the tote can achieve that viability without recourse to the Clause. Therefore, the totalisator is not being prevented in any way from going into the off-course market still, whether it buys its way in or negotiates a deal with a firm of bookmakers or more than one firm. The tote is still free to go into the off-course market and must make its own assessment of the economies and the commercial advantages to it of doing so.
The only effect of this Amendment is —believing that the tote can achieve such viability without a Statutory advantage—to put that statutory advantage into cold storage, so that if in the end it finds that it cannot achieve viability without going into the market on its own account it can ask the Home Secretary to activate


the Clause. There is no change in the intention of the Government to strengthen the competition to the bookmakers, but we have always envisaged this competition as making readily available to the public an alternative method of betting. I believe that that can now be achieved without Clause 3, by arrangements which the tote may make either with the bookmakers as a whole or with any group of bookmakers.
Therefore, my answer to the hon. Member for Accrington (Mr. Arthur Davidson) when he asks how the tote intends to come into the off-course starting price market is that this must be a matter for the board's commercial judgment. All the Government wish to make clear is that they do not consider that it is now necessary for the tote at this stage to have the advantages which would enable it to make its way into the market which at one stage appeared to be the only possible means by which it could be made viable.

Amendment agreed to.

Clause 4

ALLOWANCE TO RACECOURSE MANAGEMENT PROVIDING POOL BETTING FACILITIES

Amendment made: No. 61, in page 3, line 25, at end insert:
'(2) It is hereby declared that the purposes for which the Levy Board have power under section 25(2)(d) of the Act of 1963 to make payments (in accordance with schemes prepared by them and approved by the Secretary of State) as purposes conducive to the improvement of horseracing include the provision on approved horse racecourses of facilities for sponsored pool betting, whether provided by the Totalisator Board or by the persons having the management of the course'.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

Mr. Arthur Lewes: I beg to move Amendment No. 62 in page 3, line 25, at end insert:
'(3) After subsection (2) of the said section 13 there shall be added the following "() Before imposing under this section any condition which would or might affect the carrying on by bookmakers of their business on any ground used as a horse racecourse the Levy Board shall consult the Bookmakers' Committee
This is an important Amendment. I have not delayed the House, nor do I intend to, but the Amendment should be given consideration. You will be aware, Mr. Deputy Speaker, like the rest of us,

that we are in trouble because we have a dock strike. We have a lot of industrial upheaval in the country because the Government refuse to do what Governments usually do—negotiate and get agreements with those involved, in that way trying to avoid difficulties before they arise.
The Amendment provides an opportunity for consultation. I am in favour of consultation. I wish we had more of it in this House. If we had it other than through the usual channels, we might not have these long hours or such bad conditions. I am in favour of consultation for everyone, including myself. But particularly am I in favour of consultation in this case between the Levy Board and the Bookmakers' Committee. I do not see why any person or organisation, including the Government and the Levy Board, should seek to impose any conditions on anyone else without consultation with those concerned. I cannot expect the Levy Board to consult every bookmaker or every firm of bookmakers, but it is possible for it to consult the Bookmakers' Committee on matters which will or might affect the carrying on by the bookmakers of their business.
If the Government intend taking action affecting the well-being of the big businessmen they most certainly consult the CBI and the company directors. There is nothing wrong in suggesting that the Levy Board, which gets its money from the bookmakers, should, if it has any intention of taking any action which might have an effect upon the business of the bookmakers, be statutorily bound to consult with the bookmakers before taking that action. I hope that the Minister will accept this Amendment because if the Levy Board means to be reasonable and generous I am sure it would not object to this.

Mr. Carlisle: This Amendment was also discussed in Committee. All I need say to the hon. Gentleman is that the only effect of Clause 4 is to transfer the power to approve racecourses from the Tote Board to the Levy Board. I made clear in Committee, and I do so now, that in the opinion of the Government this transfer of responsibility does not in any way enlarge the scope of Section 13 of the 1963 Act and does not provide for the Levy Board any wider powers than the Tote Board has at the moment.
The only difference is that the Bookmakes' Committee is represented on the Levy Board through its chairman who is, ex officio, a member of the Levy Board. This strengthens the position of the Bookmakers' Committee—

Mr. Arthur Lewis: While I accept what the Minister says, am I not right in saying that if there is a discussion on the Horserace Levy Board, with the bookmakers' representative present, there is nothing saying that the Bookmakers' Committee as a whole must be consulted before action is taken upon something which might affect the bookmakers?
Is it not reasonable that the bookmakers should be consulted in the same way as trade unions? If Jack Jones is called back to his executive committee, his executive committee can be consulted.I have nothing against whoever may represent the bookmakers on the Levy Board. He may be a good chap. All I am suggesting is that the Bookmakers' Committee in tote should be consulted when something is contemplated which affects their business.

12.15 a.m.

Mr. Carlisle: It is doubtful whether the provision contained in Section 13 of the 1963 Act allows the imposition of any new condition which might significantly affect the conduct of betting on the course. Since the only effect of the Clause is to transfer powers, it is extremely doubtful whether the Levy Board could impose any such condition. If, despite what I say about the unlikelihood of its being able to do so, it were able to do so, at least the hon. Gentleman has the assurance that since the bookmakers' representative is an ex officio member of the Board the bookmakers' voice can be heard.
I appreciate that consultation with the full committee may be better than being merely represented by one individual on it, but I can assure the hon. Member that that which he is seeking to protect—the interest of the bookmakers, is better protected by the powers transferred to the Levy Board than the present situation, where the powers rest with the Tote Board. I cannot accept that the further extension of the protection that the hon. Member is asking for is necessary.

Question put, That the Amendment be made:—

The House proceeded to a Division; but no Member being willing to act as Teller for the Ayes, Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER declared that the Noes had it.

Clause 6

POWER OF LEVY BOARD TO GIVE FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE TO TOTALISATOR BOARD

Amendment made: No. 66, in page 3, line 38, leave out Clause 6.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

Title

Amendment made: No. 81, in Title, line 7, leave out from first 'Board' to 'to' in line 9.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

Motion made, and Question proposed. That the Bill be now read the Third time.—[Mr. Carlisle.]

12.20 a.m.

Mr. Arthur Lewis: I am amazed. The Minister is not going to give us any reason why the Bill should have a Third Reading.

Mr. Carlisle: I have heard the hon. Member at such length that I thought that I should have the opportunity of replying to him and having the final word rather than the first.

Mr. Lewis: This is amazing, because this is not the Bill which was debated on Second Reading or in Committee. It is an entirely different Bill—

Mr. Jerry Wiggin: And a much better Bill.

Mr. Lewis: Of course it is, because every Amendment suggested by hon. Members on both sides in Committee has, in the last two or three weeks, come forward from the Government.
I am glad that the Minister of State has allowed me the opportunity of saying a few words. I have been very brief during the stages of the Bill, particularly on Report. However, the House has been kept up late at night—

Mr. Wiggin: The hon. Gentleman has just called a Division without putting his


name forward as a Teller. He has hardly contributed to speeding the business.

Mr. Lewis: If the hon. Gentleman had been a Member for a little longer, he would have realised that if there are not two Tellers the Division is ineffective. I could not find anyone to act as a Teller. I know that I am rather large, but I do not make up for two people. I tried to get an hon. Friend to tell with me, but, loyal and honest gentleman that he is, he had given his word that he would not vote.
A lot of crocodile tears have been shed during the stages of the Bill about the poor ailing Tote Board. It has been said that we should come to its aid and that we should rescue the poor racehorse owners. It is a crying shame that we have to stay up late at night in order to help the racehorse owners and other people who follow the sport of horse racing. I should have thought that there were much more important subjects which we could have discussed at this late hour.
My hon. Friend the Member for Accrington (Mr. Arthur Davidson) will probably agree that I was about the only Member who opposed the Bill throughout because I thought it was phoney. Now it has been proved to be phoney. When the pressure was put on, the Government had second thoughts about all the most objectionable Clauses about which they were scared because a number of their supporters were talking about revolting on them. Now we have a Bill which is nothing like the original Bill, and we should not allow the Government to get away with it by a cursory nod. We should not allow the Bill to go through without castigating and attacking the Government.
I am glad to see my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden) present because probably he is very happy. He has obtained all he wanted. He has been very successful, and his success shows the failure of the Government. He would not wish me to say that, and the Government would not wish me to say there have been failures on their part, but I can remember that on Second Reading and in Committee we were told, "We must have this" and "We must have that", "We cannot give this away" or "We cannot give that"

because, it was said, the whole principle of the Bill would be lost.
So what do we find? In Committee we sat from 20th April to 22nd June. I said a few words in Committee—not very much, as I have already said. Here is the OFFICIAL REPORT, the verbatim record of our debates. There was talk of extra Sittings of the Committee. A rumour went round that consultations were going on—though there were consultations with my usual channels—about whether we should have extra Sittings to get the Bill through. The Minister had a day off the Committee to go to a conference in E.E.C., although we were told we had to get the Bill through. [Interruption.] The Minister attended a conference in Europe. The Committee was adjourned so he could go. He set a record; he will be pleased to know that that had not been done before—the Government had not got a Minister to take over and so, because the hon. and learned Gentleman wanted to go to that conference in Europe, the Committee was adjourned. But this Bill was so important!
By the way, I was in attendance all the time. I can pat myself on the back for that. I do not think I left the Committee Room even to attend to the wants of nature. At my time of life that is something to be proud of and thankful for. Some of my hon. Friends, unfortunately, had other Committees to attend. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints was a Member of the Committee on the Finance Bill. However, I was able to give the Committee my usual service and the Bill my usual diligent attention. I sat through the proceedings and battled on, and I had active help and support from many hon. Members on the other side. The Government had the active support of the Opposition Whips who rallied our people to give the Government a quorum in Committee so that they could get on with their Bill.
All this for what? So that we can have a Third Reading now of a Bill which is entirely different from the original Bill. All has been done since 22nd June. I was going to say between 22nd June and August, but most of the Amendments which have been before us tonight were put down a week or so back. The Minister said he was glad to see the change brought about in the Bill, but it all happened in the last few weeks. It is an


amazing situation. It could have been done sooner.
I hope the Minister gets the opportunity to have a word with the new Chairman of the Totalisator Board. I pay tribute to the new chairman, a very good friend of mine, Lord Mancroft, who, as I said in Committee, has done marvellous work for my local boys' club, which, I am glad to say, is the best boys' club anywhere. I wish him well in his endeavours as chairman of the board. I am sure he could not do worse than the previous lot. The Minister does not get much time, because of the work which has been imposed on him in various fields, but I hope he gets time to have a word with those people who misled him, misled the Government, and, more importantly, misled this House. I hope he will tell them that when they come forward with their claims and ask for legislation and help they should see that the facts and figures they give to the Ministry are correct. I, as an ordinary back bencher, do not like —I am sure no hon. Members like—to be fed with a lot of false information.
After we have done all the work we have in Committee, what we asked for then is given us at the last moment now; it could have been given weeks ago, and saved us this late night Sitting.

12.30 a.m.

Mr. Carlisle: I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will accept that the meeting had nothing to do with the EEC.

Mr. Brian Walden: I do not think that the Minister, even in advanced old age, will ever forget that on one occasion during the Committee stage of the Bill he went to a conference in Europe. I am sure that, like Calais, it will be engraved on his heart.

Mr. Carlisle: I accept that. Equally, I do not think my hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench will ever forget that an Opposition whip provided the quorum for the Committee on one occasion.

Mr. Walden: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis). When he says he has been diligent, that is putting it mildly. As always, he has been extremely diligent, and he may have done the Government a great service.
In the end, we have come up with the best Bill possible. I have a financial interest in the Bill which post-dates my interest in the subject. I have always thought, not only on this Bill but on other Bills in the last Parliament, that the direction in which the Government were inclined to go would he fatal in terms of the betting market. The original Bill would have done nothing but damage, and the Government would have bitterly regretted having passed it. They will not regret passing this Bill.
As a result of the Bill, the Government will be able to expand the Totalisator Board by inviting on to it people with management and financial experience, and the board will be stronger as a result. The Government will have reserve powers in Clause 3 which can be activated by Order to assist the Totalisator Board into the off-course market if the board feels that it is not getting fair treatment vis-à-vis the bookmakers. They will have got rid of the utterly odious and thoroughly dangerous practice of allowing the Levy Board to give substantial sums of money to the Totalisator Board to get involved in an agency agreement with a private bookmaker.
The Minister will think in years to come, if he does not think so already, that in the end he did the best job he could for racing. For betting the result of the Bill will be the best of all worlds, namely, a strong form of pool betting with a competitor on-course and off-course. The consequences for the betting side and for race courses, racecourse owners and punters will be much more desirable than they would have been had the Bill gone through as originally drafted.
I congratulate the Minister on getting his Third Reading in spite of the length of our debates in Committee. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham, North for ensuring that Report and Third Reading are much briefer than I supposed they would be. I was quite prepared to have breakfast at about 11 o'clock. The Government have given us in the end an acceptable Bill, as a result of which this kind of trouble will for ever cease for the Tote, and the Government will not have to concern themselves overmuch with the regulation of the horseracing industry.

12.34 a.m.

Mr. Arthur Davidson: I shall be exceedingly brief, because the Bill as it has emerged from Report is barely worth talking about. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, All Saints (Mr. Brian Walden), as he openly says, represents the interests of the National Association of Bookmakers, and of course that association is exceptionally pleased with the Bill. I agree with my hon. Friend when he says that the Minister has done his best in difficult circumstances. I am sure that the Minister has tried to come up with the best solution. I do not know whether he has succeeded, and the less I say about that the better. When in the past I have supported the Minister I have always found that subsequently he has changed his mind, and I do not want to be put in that position again. However, I know that he has never misled the Committee intentionally; he has always been frank and open with it.
I am sure the Minister began the proceedings on this Bill without knowing very much about betting. I think he now knows his way around it admirably. Since the Bill is now a different Bill, we ought to be discussing what is not in it rather than what is in it. Because there is so little left in the Bill, there is nothing more I feel like saying.

12.36 a.m.

Mr. Carlisle: I wish first to say that the basic principles of the Bill remain as they were when the Bill was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Barnet (Mr. Maudling) some six months or more ago. The main purpose of the Bill was then, as now, to provide for a viable future for the Totalisator Board.
The main Clause is Clause 1 which provides power for the Totalisator Board to enter into fixed odds betting as well as pool betting, and betting on races abroad as well as in this country; and it also empowers the tote to enter into pool fixed odds bettings on any sporting event. In other words, it removes the fetters on the Tote which, due to the changing social climate over the last 15 years, had ceased to enable the Tote to act viably.
The second object of the Bill was to provide the possibility of a wider and stronger Board, and that remains. A

further object of the Bill was to enable the management of race courses in those areas where the Tote found it unprofitable to carry on the Tote profitably and viably, to do so. That also has been retained.
The only way in which the Bill has changed—and I concede at once that it has changed and that, as we conceded at the outset, we have listened to arguments with regard to its change—is in fact that, other than by parliamentary order, we have postponed the implementation of that Clause which provided a means of entry of the Tote into the off course market; and we have also, as a result of the improved financial situation of the Tote as against the fears as to its financial situation over the last 12 months, found it possible to remove the financial assistance which the Bill provided for the Tote through the Levy Board, and instead to replace this with the power to write off further indebtedness.
Those were the two major controversial Clauses of the Bill, and throughout I have said that I would look to see whether we could alter them. With respect to hon. Members opposite, I thought they might have been grateful for the fact that the Government, as a result of discussion, have found means to meet the varied points made on those Clauses.
I believe that the Bill as it leaves the House will achieve the aim of providing a viable future for the Tote, whose main purpose should be to provide—as the Government have always intended it to provide—pool betting with adequate outlets so as to provide an alternative method of betting to the public, though clearly indicating to the Board that, if it wishes, it may choose to go into fixed odds betting to assist in ensuring its viability. I believe that the Bill will provide that end and that the Tote has a great future under its new chairman.
I said earlier that I did not intend to be rude about the hon. Member for West Ham, North (Mr. Arthur Lewis). However, I find it a little hard to take from him the criticism that this Bill has taken up unnecessary time in this House. I make this comment more in sorrow than in anger. I remind the hon. Gentleman that he chose on Report to table 67 new Clauses and 72 Amendments, all of which required those in the Home Office to provide notes over many weeks. What


is more, they followed the 60 odd new Clauses and the many Amendments that the hon. Gentleman tabled in Committee. His opposition to the Bill has not affected it in one iota as it leaves this House. All that his opposition has done is to cause a great deal of unnecessary work for many people who might well have been spared it.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

LAND CHARGES BILL [Lords]

Considered in Committee.

[Sir ROBERT GRANT-FERRIS in the Chair]

Clauses 1 to 16 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 17

INTERPRETATION

Question proposed, That the Clause stand part of the Bill.

12.42 a.m.

Mr. Michael Cocks: When I examined the Minutes of the Joint Committee, I was surprised that there was no comment on this consolidation Measure, since I thought that the Committee's attention would be drawn to Clause 17 and its reference in line 18 to "rentcharge". Right hon. and hon. Members may recall that I said on Second Reading that I did not think it appropriate at this stage to pass a Bill containing rentcharges since we were awaiting the report of the Law Commission and the near promise of some future Government action.
It had been my intention to table an Amendment to the Clause. I was hoping on this occasion to be 13th time lucky, having been unsuccessful with a clutch of 12 Amendments to the Hydrocarbon Oil (Customs and Excise) Bill last Session.
I appreciate that this word "rentcharge" does not refer to chief rents. However, it is a Pavlovian trigger to me and, in this connection, it is no coincidence that so many hon. Members representing West Country constituencies are present. This

is a problem which is peculiar to the West Country and Manchester. I have received correspondence from people in the West Country who read in the Press that I intended to table an Amendment to the Bill.
I apologise to the Solicitor-General for this misunderstanding. In expiation I can only say that there are two types of Members, first and second-class. A first-class Member is one with legal training. A second-class Member is one who blunders along but who possibly does not have his feelings quite so blunted by the "on the one hand, on the other hand" attitude of his legal brethren.
If the Solicitor-General can throw some light on the subject, even at this late hour a couple of minutes spent on it will not have been in vain.

12.45 a.m.

Mr. Robert Cooke: Speaking as another first-class Bristol Member following the first-class Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks), perhaps I may make a point before my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General replies. This is a consolidation Measure. Therefore, presumably, it represents the collected body of law.
I know that the hon. Member—I nearly said my hon. Friend; we can be good friends about this—for Bristol, South, does not like the law as he sees it to exist and he sought to change it. He has not succeeded in changing the law in this matter, however, and ground rents, rent-charges and other similar matters are still legal and must, therefore, be paid.
The hon. Member has unwittingly encouraged some of his constituents to withhold from my constituents—the owners of ground rents, rentcharges and what have you—some of the money that is due to them. Lest it should be thought that up in Clifton there are rich landlords who own the land on which stand the houses of people who live in South Bristol, I should explain that it is not quite like that at all.
There are many people living on savings, small incomes, ground rents and similar things bought for them perhaps by their parents. Elderly maiden ladies, for example, live on these things. It is a great hardship to them to try to collect any small sums from people living in


Bristol, South, and elsewhere if unwittingly they have been encouraged otherwise by the hon. Member for Bristol, South.
I hope, therefore, that we can at least say that this is the law and that until the hon. Member succeeds in changing it these landcharges and ground rents are legal and should be paid.

The Solicitor-General (Sir Geoffrey Howe): I am grateful to the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) for giving me the opportunity of raising this point and, I hope, disposing of it in a modest way quite shortly.
The hon. Member for Bristol, South, appears to be dominated by canine metaphors. On the last occasion we discussed this matter he was concerned that we were not letting sleeping dogs lie. This evening he has spoken about his Pavlovian reaction. I wish no disrespect to him when I draw attention to those two facts.
The position is, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West, said, that the law in relation to chief rents or perpetual rentcharges is not being changed by this legislation, for the simple reason that chief rents are outside the Bill. Clause 17(1), which is the interpretation Clause, contains a reference to "a rent-charge", which is merely a word used in the definition of "annuity", but that does not mean that the law relating to rent-charges or chief rents is being altered by this legislation, which does not touch on it.
The Committee will recall that a rent-charge is a periodical payment in respect of land where the relationship of landlord and tenant does not exist. In other words, "a rentcharge" is a general expression for rent other than rent in the ordinary course of a lease.
The hon. Member and my hon. Friend are concerned with two aspects of a particular variety of rentcharge known as a chief rent. A chief rent arises from the sale of a freehold for the income in the form of a perpetual rent rather than for a capital sum. That kind of chief rent is outside the Bill since it is not registrable under the Bill as a rentcharge of any class.
There is, therefore, no need to amend or reconsider the definition of "annuity"

as the hon. Member for Bristol, South at one time had in mind. That relates to interests limited to periods of years or to the life of a person. A chief rent is distinctive because it is not limited in that way. From whichever side of the argument one approaches the matter, the Committee can rest assured that the Bill has nothing to do with chief rents.
I hope that I do not expose myself to the risk of curtailment from you, Sir Robert, before I go on to make a further comment which may be helpful to hon. Members. The Law Commission is urgently considering the question of chief rents and will be publishing a working paper in the near future setting out its proposals, which are not definitive and are intended merely to invite further comments. I understand that the proposals are likely to be, first, that legal rentcharges should still be capable of creation but only as a clear alternative to a purchase of the unencumbered freehold. In other words, the purchaser should be given a choice of buying at £x without a rentcharge or at £x minus £y with the difference being made up by means of a rentcharge. Second, any such rentcharge should not be capable of lasting for more than 70 years. Third, existing legal rentcharges should he extinguished on the basis of automatic expiry without compensation after a specified number of years. Fourth, the procedures for apportioning and redeeming rentcharges should be simplified and improved. The object should be, among other things, to get rid of the present situation whereby a property may be the subject of a number of different rent-charges. The aim should be one property one rentcharge at the most.
I know not whether those proposals which are likely to be put forward for consideration will serve to bring together the differing viewpoints of the hon. Member for Bristol, South and his constituents and my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West and his constituents, but the Committee may at least be glad to have the tentative proposals before it so that they may be considered during the coming Recess. I cannot believe that the gulf on this or any other matter which lies between the citizens of these two quarters of Bristol is all that great or is in any sense unbridgeable. I hope that the debate on this Clause will help to cement


their citizenly solidarity on other this and other0 matters.

Mr. Jerry Wiggin: The House will be grateful for that statement by my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General. I can claim to be in both camps, because I have in my constituency many who possess these rentcharges and many who pay them. This is a matter of substantial controversy in our part of the world.
We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) for raising the matter and for pursuing it. I have not always been totally on the hon. Gentleman's side, although his proposals have largely been to make illegal the creation of new rentcharges, as there are methods by which existing ones can be terminated.
Without prolonging the debate, I assure my hon. and learned Friend that his announcement will be universally welcomed both by those who possess these rentcharges and by those who pay them.

Mr. Arthur Davidson: I am so surprised to hear what the Solicitor-General has to say that I feel that I must rise to congratulate him. This problem is not confined to Bristol. In north-east Lancashire there is a problem particularly in regard to the collection of ground rents which ultimately involves their apportionment.
The Solicitor-General may remember that I was given leave to introduce, under the Ten-Minutes Rule procedure, a Bill designed to abolish this form of collection, whereby one person has to collect the ground rents for a whole block, this involving arguments between neighbours and the type of situation which looks like developing between my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) and the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke).
I hope that the recommendations of the Law Commission will be published shortly and that they will ultimately result in legislation to abolish some of the worst iniquities which result from the ground rent or chief rent problem, however it is described.

Mr. S. C. Silkin: I congratulate the five hon. Members who have spoken so far, particularly the Solicitor-General, on keeping so skilfully within the rules of order on a consolidation Bill. I congratulate in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) on his assiduity in remaining here on three occasions now to a very late hour to raise this matter—on Second Reading, on Second Reading action replay a few days later, and again tonight. As a result, he has succeeded in obtaining a valuable statement from the Solicitor-General, which I am sure all hon. Members will welcome. We shall read with interest in HANSARD at some later date the proposals of the Law Commission. From what I heard of them I think that they will be broadly welcome, but of course we shall want to study them in greater detail before we can say that we shall accept them in all their content. This has been a useful short debate, and I am most grateful to my hon. Friend for having raised it.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 17 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clauses 18 and 19 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Schedules 1 to 5 agreed to.

Bill reported, without Amendment.

Motion made, and Question, That the Bill be now read the Third time, put forthwith pursuant to Standing Order No. 56 (Third Reading) and agreed to.

NATIONAL DEBT BILL

Order for Second Reading read.

12.56 a.m.

The Solicitor-General (Sir Geoffrey Howe): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
The Bill consolidates enactments relating to basically three previous Acts on national savings—principally the National Debt Act, 1958, the National Loans Act, 1968 and certain aspects of the Post Office Act, 1969 which was the statute which made it desirable to consolidate these provisions.
The Bill contains three proposals which were set out in the memorandum submitted by my right hon. and noble Friend the Lord Chancellor, one of which appears in Clause 8, one in Clause 15 and the other in Clause 16, and I do not think that the House would wish me to trouble it at this stage with an enunciation of those matters which are of the most marginal significance.
The Bill has passed through all its stages in another place. It has been considered by the Joint Consultation Committee, which expresed the opinion
that the Bill consolidates the existing law with such corrections and improvements as can properly be authorised under the Consolidation of Enactments (Procedure) Act 1949.
The committee said that there was no point to which the attention of Parliament ought to be drawn.
That was the committee's report after its meeting on 5th July, and it is upon that basis that I commend the Bill to the House.

12.59 a.m.

Mr. S. C. Silkin: I do not wish to delay the House for any length of time on the Second Reading of this consolidation Measure, and I hope that it will pass through its various stages with even greater rapidity than the Land Charges Bill, but I must raise for consideration one point on the procedure which has been adopted by the Joint Consolidation Committee.
As the Solicitor-General said, the Bill contains certain minor amendments to the existing law which are dealt with in this way by virtue of the provisions of the Consolidation of Enactments (Procedure) Act, 1949. That Act lays down a procedure which is carefully and clearly set out in Section 1 as to the method which should be employed if Parliament, when it is dealing with a consolidation Measure, wishes to make corrections and minor improvements which have been put before Parliament by a memorandum of the Lord Chancellor. Reading the procedure as set out in that Act and reading the minutes of evidence to the Joint Committee, it seems to me that the Joint Committee, in what I consider a most praiseworthy attempt to deal with the matter expeditiously, has telescoped the procedure authorised by the Act so as to omit the part which the Act requires.
That is my reading of the amendment to the 1949 Act, and my reading may be quite wrong. Certainly it appears from the report of the committee that the procedure employed in this case was a novel one which was produced through the ingenuity of the clerk to avoid the need for the committee having a second meeting to receive the approval of Mr. Speaker and the Lord Chancellor of its report about the corrections and minor improvements that it was prepared to approve before dealing with the Bill. It appears that approval was given in advance, no doubt with the praiseworthy intention of telescoping and short-ciruiting the procedure. The procedure adopted is one which I would not fault in any way when applied to uncontroversial legislation, other than that it does not seem to be in accordance with the provisions of the Statute, provisions which seem quite clear and precise.
Others may disagree with the view I have expressed about that and all that I am arguing at this stage—I am not opposing the Bill—is that this apparently novel procedure should be considered in order that it may be ascertained whether it is in conformity with the Statute or whether it is a departure from it which would not permit the making of the minor corrections and amendments which have been made in the Bill.

1.5 a.m.

The Solicitor-General: By leave of the House, I should like briefly to comment on the point raised by the hon. and learned Member for Dulwich (Mr. S. C. Silkin), a point characteristic of the assiduity with which he applies himself to the task of scrutinising these unexhilarating Measures which slink their way through the House at these small hours of the morning.
He is perfectly right to say that the procedure followed by the Select Committee was, as set out in the report of the Joint Select Committee, as a result of the ingenuity of the Clerk of the committee, and it appears from that that it was the first time that that procedure had been followed. The hon. and learned Member advanced the suggestion that it was not in accordance with what was required by subsections (3) and (4) of Section 1 of the Consolidation of Enactments (Procedure) Act, 1949. I am sure


that he will not be surprised to know that the course suggested and adopted by the Joint Committee was not adopted or suggested without consideration.
He advanced the view that it was not in accordance with Statute. I would not seek on this much notice to resolve the point, but I should have thought that there were reasonable grounds for concluding that the course taken was legitimate. In the first line of subsection (3) there is a reference to the phrase
at or after the time
and it later says
after considering any such representations
and finally
before reporting
Subsection (3) has three indications of importance being attached to the time scale, whereas subsection (4), which deals with the concurrence of the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker in the committee's approval, has no reference to timing one way or the other, and it would appear that the concurrence of the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker could therefore have been expressed or become available to the committee without reference to whether it was a concurrence arising before or after the Committee's approval, or at least that concurrence of the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker could have been, as seems to have happened in this case, conveyed to the committee, as it were, in escrow in advance of its consideration.
Obviously, now that the hon. and learned Gentleman has raised the point, it is something that will no doubt have to be considered by the Joint Select Committee and indeed by those who advise it, and the House will be grateful to the hon. and learned Gentleman for his indication that he does not wish to stand in the way of the passage of the Bill. It is worth commenting that this would not vitally affect the operation of the Bill hereafter. The 1949 Act in a headnote says that it is meant to facilitate the preparation of Bills, and the actual process of an enactment is that

which takes place in the two Houses through the ordinary procedures of First, Second and Third Readings, Committee and Report stages and so on. Any illegitimacy which there may be, which is denied, in the preparation of this legislative child is overcome by the subsequent legitimisation of its passage through this House and another place.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mr. Murton.]

Committee this day.

POISONS BILL [Lords]

Order for Second Reading read.

1.9 a.m.

The Solicitor-General (Sir Geoffrey Howe): I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I trust that I may commend this to the House as being no more than a straightforward consolidation Bill. It is basically a consolidation of Part III of the Pharmacy and Poisons Act, 1933, as amended by Schedule 5 of the Medicines Act, 1968. There are some very small pure drafting improvements, but none which needs detain the House for any length of time. The Bill has been through all its stages in another place, and it was the subject of a favourable report without comment from the Joint Consolidation Committee on 5th July.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Bill committed to a Committee of the whole House.—[Mt. Murton.]

Committee this day.

ADJOURNMENT

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Murton.]

ROADS (NORTH SOMERSET)

1.10 a.m.

Mr. Jerry Wiggin: It is perhaps poetic justice that my hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General, who had to sit through a debate on Somerset roads in the early hours of Thursday morning before debating a legal matter, has perhaps been able to get a little of his own back tonight.
It does not seem many hours since my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment came to debate on Second Reading of the Consolidated Fund Bill the problems of Bristol's traffic. My hon. Friends the Members for Bridgwater (Mr. Tom King), Wells (Mr. Boscawen) and Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) are here tonight, as well as the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks). I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will appreciate the very grave difficulties we are all experiencing in our part of the country.
Because of the lack of HANSARD and the early hour at which the debate on the Consolidated Fund Bill took place, I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me if I briefly touch on the problems of the M5 bridge. I repeat that I welcome the decision to open the part of the motorway from Gordano to Edithmead when it is completed. I fully accept that this will cause some problems for certain parts of the Long Ashton rural district, but I am certain that it is the right decision.
Unhappily, I cannot say that anyone is pleased by the news that the M5 Avonmouth bridge will not be open before the end of next summer. I merely quote briefly from a report in the Western Daily Press of the day after the debate, which said:
The West was officially doomed yesterday to holiday traffic chaos again next year. The Government confirmed that the M5 Avonmouth bridge will not be open until after next summer.
An editorial in the same newspaper asked:
Are we really surprised to hear that the M5 Avonmouth bridge will not be open for next summer?
Of course we are not.
We expected it.
The surprise will come when it does open, and suddenly traffic flows swiftly around Bristol instead of crawling through it.

My hon. Friend has explained the difficulties his Department faces in completing the bridge, but once again may we urge on him the extra working and double shifts, and consideration of the possibility even of a single track Bailey bridge. The Automobile Association has suggested that ferries might be used. Let us examine every possible alternative, because there will be incredible chaos next summer if nothing can be done.
My hon. Friend also touched on the question of road improvements in the area. I mentioned to him my own ideas on that.
There is in addition the question of the traffic flow through Bristol. There is more than one crossing of the river Avon that can be used instead of the M5 Avonmouth bridge. There is the Clifton suspension bridge, and there are the other, low-level bridges. I am sure that the secret will be to see that at the height of the traffic flow all those routes are used equally. There is nothing more frustrating than to be stuck in a jam on the Portway while the traffic is flowing across the Clifton bridge. If there can be liaison between these various routes, a great deal of trouble will be avoided.
I repeat also the plea to see that the junctions on the A38 are kept reasonably free for local people. They are proving to be almost an impassable barrier at weekends. If police attention is needed, I hope that my hon. Friend will urge those responsible to see that the junctions are manned.
I turn to the specific problem of the expenditure on roads in Somerset and in particular the north of Somerset, a rapidly expanding area. People are moving south from Bristol and other parts of the country to settle in our part of the world. It is perhaps this, among other things, that has created the problem. Therefore, I took a look at some of the financial statistics. They go up to 1970 only, as the 1971 figures have not yet been published.
For comparison with the county of Somerset, I took my old county of Worcestershire, where I lived and was brought up, and Northumberland, in the North. I appreciate that it is possible to be selective on both sides of the argument, but I picked out these counties at random.
I compare first the expenditure on trunk roads in the three counties. In this respect, Somerset comes out quite well with a figure of £25 per mile against £11 for Worcestershire and £22·3 for Northumberland. The figures for maintenance per mile of trunk roads are, Somerset £1,797 per mile, Worcestershire £7,810 and Northumberland £2,187. The population of Somerset is 600,000, of Worcestershire 459,000 and of Northumberland 505,000 so they are not so dissimilar. But if anything Worcestershire with a lower population, and lower number of vehicles than Somerset, and a lower mileage of road, still spends substantially more on a per mile basis on maintenance.
In the case of principal roads the figures are even more startling. Somerset is spending on new road construction for principal roads £1,100 per mile, Worcestershire £9,600 and Northumberland £15,100. We have 4,171 miles of small road in Somerset and the spending on these per mile is £103 in Somerset, £390 in Worcestershire and £370 in Northumberland. One has to look further into the deep West Country before one finds other counties spending less per mile than Somerset.
No doubt my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State will say that this is to a large extent not a matter for his Department, but the time has come when it has to be. We have to see what can be done to do something about the disastrous roads in the West Country, particularly in Somerset. The county surveyor is reported to have said that Somerset's roads are up to standard. His standard and mine are not the same. Our road system in Somerset falls substantially behind the standard to which I have been accustomed in the Midlands. I hope that it will be possible for my hon. Friend to divert Government funds to assist with the road system in the West.
I appreciate that the question of economic assessment and return on the nation's capital is involved. I have a suspicion, although I have no grounds for it, that the economic assessment for tourist traffic has not been done on the same basis as the economic assessment for industrial and other traffic. But the tourist's car and very often his caravan take up as much or more space on our roads, clogging local business and other

interests, and ought to be treated on the same basis. If we are to expand the tourist industry in the West, which we intend to do, and to which the Government give their blessing and money, we must do something about the roads. The question of economic assessment and economic return must be looked at.
I turn now to two particularly local problems—two bypasses, each of which will cost over £l million, the bulk of which will clearly have to come from the Government. The first and more important is at Banwell and Winscombe, two small villages both of which have substantially outgrown their original planned size. Their main streets date from the horse and buggy age. The very fact of their attractiveness has encouraged people to develop in them and it means that many people pass through them on their way to work in Weston and other places. In Banwell, the situation is aggravated because it is on a very steep hill. Despite constant pressure from the parish council, from Axbridge Rural District Council, myself and others, we seem unable to get the county council to place this work on any priority list. I hope that when he visits the area my hon. Friend will attempt to pass through Ban-well on a busy day, because he will then see immediately the necessity for a bypass. The bypass of the village will have the advantage also of bypassing Winscombe which has had to take the drastic step of controlling its parking and has temporarily at least improved the traffic flow, although many local people find the restrictions irksome. The problem in Yatton is the same. A small main street is quite inadequate to take the heavy flow of traffic.
I apologise for galloping a little, but I know that my hon. Friends would like to intervene and there is much ground to cover.
I turn to the borough of Weston-super-Mare and its major road pattern. These are matters wholly falling within the province of the Minister although it is true that the allocation of funds comes through the Somerset County Council. The county council is perfectly happy and ready to give the schemes I am talking about priority if the money is available from central Government. My hon. Friend's predecessor made a statement to the effect that £80 million would be available for urban road development in towns where transportation studies have been


made. My hon. Friend will know that Weston has recently completed its transportation study. We are anxious to get at least our fair share of this money.
I quote from a letter which confirms the county council's view in which it is said that it is:
…quite clear that the first priority is Locking Moor Bridges followed by the Southern Distributor Road.
It goes on to say that it is true:
that insufficient allocations have been made either, in the programme or the preparation list, to cover these two schemes together, and that the Council Council's application for the inclusion in the preparation list of a further stage of the network was intended to provide a balancing figure to enable these two named schemes to proceed.
My hon. Friend's predecessor wrote to me saying that the Locking Moor construction of new bridges over the railway was in the firm programme but he would not confirm the other roadworks. I am extremely anxious that both the road known as the Southern Distributor Road and the other part of the road which will go eventually on to the motorway should be completed. It would be common sense and good business practice if the Government were to consider investing in these three schemes all at once. They are all inter-related and inter-connected and will, I am sure, give a good economic return.
With the expenditure on roads, particularly in other parts of the world, I hope my hon. Friend will consider that these get their proper priority. I hope that having rushed through these problems, I have shown the Minister how seriously we view our traffic problem in the South-West, particularly North Somerset. I know the Minister has already taken a personal interest in the problem. I hope that he will turn that interest into substantial action.

1.23 a.m.

Mr. Tom King: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Wiggin) for his diligence in yet again bringing this important problem before the House. It is a measure of the anxiety that we feel in Somerset over the situation. At the same time, that anxiety should not disguise our appreciation for what the Minister has done in the short time he has been in post in showing a real interest in our

problems, which is appreciated by us all. We also appreciate the work of the Department in what it has done for the schemes in Highbridge and Bridgwater to improve the traffic flow—not all of which have worked. It has shown a readiness to reconsider the problem and to adapt itself.
What it is trying to do at present is a thankless task because it is trying to put a quart into a pint pot. This is a short-term problem. We recognise the tremendous amount of money being spent in Somerset which in the long term will make a great improvement.
I have made the point earlier about the need for the secondary road system. May I concentrate on two points directly connected with the motorway. In the debate initiated by the hon. Member for Bristol, South (Mr. Michael Cocks) on Bristol traffic problems during the debates on the Consolidated Fund Bill it was mentioned that the Edithmead-Dunball section would be ready in August, 1973. This was a serious announcement because that is months late and means that Highbridge, which was promised that it would not be faced with a further summer of heavy traffic, will face this burden for another summer. It was hoped that the improvement would be ready before next summer. I would be grateful if my hon. Friend would look on this as a matter of great importance.
A further matter on which we should like an assurance concerns the bridge over the Avon. I am equally concerned with the major engineering project arising from the construction of a viaduct at Hunt-worth. I should appreciate an assurance that that is on time.

1.25 a.m.

Mr. Robert Boscawen: I also am indebted—as will be many thousands of people, not only our constituents but from all over the country—to my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Wiggin) for raising this matter yet again. Anyone who saw the jams and the queues in my constituency last weekend will know how appropriate is the timing of this debate. I am appalled to learn that the M4-M5 bridge will not be open until yet another summer tourist season has passed. I do not think that the jams, delays and the frustrations involved for those going to the South-West


are fully understood by those who plan our road networks.
Without the motorway being opened right through the tourists and visitors have to fall back on the old faithfuls—the A30 and the A303—to the South-West, both of which, in part, run through my constituency. Some lengths of those roads are only 24 ft. wide. One of the Highways Acts of last century laid down 24 ft. as being the right width. We have not progressed much since then. We are earnest in our belief that something must be done quickly to improve the situation. We know that we have a Minister who is determined to do what he can, and we congratulate him on what he has done, but I hope that he will do all he can to hurry up the M4-M5 bridge.

1.27 a.m.

Mr. Robert Cooke: In bridge construction, major engineering work should be got on with well ahead, so that road construction can follow. I agree with the view of my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. Torn King). I ask my hon. Friend to make it clear that my right hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Mr. Peyton) has nothing to do with this delay. He has no ministerial responsibility in the matter. We hear a lot of talk in the Press about his slowness to act, but it is nothing to do with him.
Not long ago we had a debate at four o'clock in the morning. Without HANSARD, some newspapers did not know what was said.
Whichever way the streams of traffic are diverted through Bristol they will converge at the top of Rownham Hill. Perhaps my hon. Friend can think of a way in which a motorway can be got through there expeditiously. If we cannot have a motorway bridge for the 1973 summer, will we have it for 1974? I do not think we can have an answer on that now. If we are not sure about 1974, we must have a temporary low level bridge further up the Avon from Avonmouth going right across the Avon. The railway line there is little used. Will my hon. Friend consider that, if we cannot have our bridge in good time?

1.29 a.m.

The Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. Keith Speed): I thank

my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (Mr. Wiggin) for this interesting and timely debate, both on the Avon Bridge and the road problems of North Somerset. I can tell him and also my hon. Friends the Members for Wells (Mr. Boscawen) and Bristol, West (Mr. Robert Cooke) that in the Department we certainly understand the real problems that will be caused, and are being caused, by the fact that this bridge is not in operation. I can give them the firm assurance that we are concerned that this will cause a great deal of hardship to local residents. I take issue with my hon. Friend the Member for Wells, who talked about tourists and visitors; I stress the problems of local residents and industry, which we must not forget; it is not just a tourists' or visitors' problem.
I shall not rehearse all the arguments about the Avon Bridge that we had the other morning, except to say that we have looked at the question of ferries. There are real problems of navigation, and particularly of congestion. Even if we could solve all the problems of access, and the tidal and navigational difficulties, the number of cars carried on a ferry is limited, and there would be problems of congestion, even with access down to the ferry. Therefore, regretfully, although this possible solution has been considered, we have had to rule it out. I can assure my hon. Friend—and this is a vital point which I stressed the other morning—that there will be the maximum flexibility in the traffic flows between traffic using Portway and that using the Clifton Bridge. It is essential that there is not an enormous build-up on one route while the other route is under capacity. We want to achieve a balance, and we are ensuring that signing and police and traffic control in the area will bring the balance and flexibility which we all seek in a temporary amelioration of the problem.
I assure my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West that this has nothing to do with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Transport Industries. If anyone should take the rap on this bridge, I am happy to take it. I note what he has said about ensuring that major engineering works, which could be the key to the whole question, are not allowed to get into this situation again. Nobody could have foreseen the box


girder problems. My hon. Friend has raised a valid point.
My hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare raised a number of points which I should like to deal with. First, he referred to the weighting given to tourist traffic. The question of the economic evaluation of roads is pretty complicated. It is more sophisticated than my hon. Friend indicated. Basically there is some truth in what he says. But when we are looking at the economic evaluation, as a starting point all vehicles are counted equally. Vehicles are normally counted on an August day, and there are formulae for converting, say, February or April figures or figures for some other month into August totals.
Nevertheless, it is true that non-work trips are valued at a quarter of work trips. I could spend a great deal of time going into the whys and wherefores of evaluation. Suffice it to say—and this is an objective assessment based on detailed research carried out over the whole country—that in working out the economic evaluation, we bear in mind that non-work trips are valued at a quarter of work trips. As against that there is the balancing factor that the vehicle occupancy for non-work trips is normally 1·9 as against 1·3 for work trips. That means that in an area where there are many more non-work trips compared with work trips one could argue that this economically vitiated against that area in its road programme.
It is more positive and perhaps more helpful if I tell the House and my hon. Friend's constituents and other people in North Somerset that we have a massive programme under way for road expenditure in this area. Total road expenditure, including maintenance, by central Government and local authorities for the last few years is as follows: in 1967–68, £5,381,000; in 1968–69, £7,501,000; in 1969–70, £7,371,000; in 1970–71, £5,953,000; and in 1971–72 the provisional figure is £10,556,000. The figures for the first four years relate to the geographical area which includes Bath, and the last year's figure relates to the administrative area of Somerset County Council.
Perhaps what is even more important and dramatic is that, looking ahead, about £60 million worth of major trunk. motorway and principal road schemes are now under construction, a further £17

million worth are soundly programmed but not yet started, and £73 million worth are in preparation—a total of about £150 million worth of work. In addition, many small road improvements are continually in hand in the county. The figure of £150 million for work in hand or planned compares with £4,300 million for England as a whole. So, in comparative terms, the County of Somerset has about 3½ per cent. of the English total, yet its population is only about 1½ per cent. of the population of England and Wales.
In the past two or three years we have seen a dramatic switch, not only in the South-West as a whole but in Somerset. in road schemes under construction, in the firm preparation pool or planned. It is, of course, my job, and it is the job of the Department, and of the local authorities concerned, to see that as fast as possible the roads planned are turned into realities.
A word or two about Weston. The position is largely as outlined to my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare by my predecessor in his letter of 7th January last. The situation is this. First of all, it is not quite true that the Land Use Transport Study is completed. There are one or two sections to complete, and this is in fact holding up, to an extent, the progressing of these roads. But the Locking Moor Road scheme is in the firm road programme and the county council expects to submit a firm programme report on it early next year. This means a possible start two years or so later. No detailed design work can begin till the firm programme report has been submitted. I understand that the county itself is waiting for the Weston L.U.T.S. to be completed.
As for the extension to the M5 motorway, this scheme is largely in the same position: it is in the preparation list. Of course, there was the other scheme my hon. Friend mentioned. This was not accepted in the preparation list. It was a scheme costing rather more than £2 million. Again, I believe that when the transport study has been completed the county will consider what it wishes to do with this scheme.
My hon. Friend mentioned the problems at Yatton and Banwell and I am not trying to pass the buck, but


at Banwell we have not yet received an approach from the county regarding a grant for a bypass. If the county council does put up a scheme, while I could not tonight prejudge it, and say whether it would be accepted or not, it would be carefully looked at and we shall bear in mind all the things my hon. Friend has said. This must be a matter for the county, and it is for the county to put up a suggestion.
The B3133 at Yatton is a non-principal road and, therefore, not eligible for grant, or for the Department. It is a matter for the county itself in its allocations. As this is a non-principal road we in the Department have no standing in the matter.
I have mentioned the enormous amount of money which is in the programme for Somerset roads over the next few years. We are very conscious, having said that, that there are problems caused by the lack of an Avon bridge and of the problems mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater in connection with the extension of the M5. I promise him I will give consideration to the matters he referred to and write to him

in the near future. I appreciate that at Bridgwater and Highbury these bypasses, which is what the extension would be, should be proceeded with sooner rather than later and certainly before the summer peaks build up. I cannot give an answer tonight, but as we have taken a decision to open the motorway, no matter what happens to the Avon bridge, we can get on with this plan before the summer peak.
In the meantime, although conditions, I am afraid, will be difficult next year, I hope that my hon. Friend will see, from the figures I have given, that perhaps at long last, and under this Government, Somerset will get a good deal and a fair deal for its road programme.

Mr. Robert Cooke: Will my hon. Friend answer one question? To help him enjoy his well deserved holiday will he read what has been said about the Avon?

Mr. Speed: I shall be delighted.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at thirty-nine minutes to Two o'clock.